DLR took part in NASA's InSight Mars mission with the HP3 instrument, whose nail-shaped thermal sensor "Mole", drove itself up to five metres into the Martian soil to measure the heat flow there.
DLR took part in NASA's InSight Mars mission with the HP3 instrument, whose nail-shaped thermal sensor "Mole", drove itself up to five metres into the Martian soil to measure the heat flow there.
At the institute, a multi-body dynamics model of the "Mole" was coupled with complex particle models of the Martian soil in a co-simulation in order to predict the impact performance with high precision. Optimisations of the "Mole" based on these models led to adjustments to the internal spring-mass systems of the impact mechanism, wherebyt the number of blows required to achieve the required penetration depth could be reduced to 25 % compared to the original design while maintaining the same power consumption.
