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The exact location of NASA's landing site InSight within Elysium Planitia is now known, thanks to the images taken by Orbiter for observing Mars.
On November 26, the surface of Martina touched the landing site InSight, and NASA scientists were convinced that once the 130 km long (130-kilometer) ellipse was chosen as an ideal landing zone. But this is the precise location within the Elysium Planitia – a flat lion plane lying north of the equator of Martia – so far it was not known.
NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), a satellite that has been in orbit around Mars since 2006, on 6 December, examined Martian surface near a suspected landing site, and then five days later. The images taken by the camera showed that the InSight location is in the plane along with the location of its discarded heat shield and parachute.
Some objects on photos have a purple look, which is not their actual color. The light "reflects from its surface, causing the color to saturate," explains NASA in the release. This effect is what is known as a mirror reflex.
"It looks like the heat shield out there is turned down, because it's so bright," he wrote a HiRISE team on his blog. "Lander disturbed the dust at a fair distance and dimmed the surface as it was already seen at Phoenix and Curiosity landing sites. The bright point associated with the landing is probably another mirror reflection, two small blue additives, which are solar arrays and their shadows . "
"The padlock, attached to the parachute, may have another grain reflection, a line extending to the southern part above the parachute is likely to be an already existing powder path," writes the HiRISE team.
As already mentioned, this is not the first time that HiRISE has taken pictures of a local place to land the Martians; In 2008, the camera noticed landing Phoenix and Curiosity's in 2012.
The InSight project is still in the initial phase, and NASA scientists are slowly testing and calibrating a number of instruments. InSight seems to have landed in a suitable place where it will be able to use its seismometer and probe for heat flux to study the conditions below the Martian surface. NASA expects this to happen in about four to six weeks.
[NASA, HiRISE]
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