InSight digs a little deeper

Work on burying troublesome cable continues

While attention has been firmly focused on Ingenuity’s feats of aviation, NASA’s InSight probe keeps on keeping on. For several weeks now, it has been slowly continuing the work of covering up the cable that connects its seismometer package to the rest of the probe, in order to prevent from flapping against the surface in the wind and interfering with the probe’s ability to detect faint seismic waves from deep within the planet.

InSight’s scoop deposits more soil onto the probe’s seismometer cable. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Paul Hammond

The above GIF shows the probe’s soil scoop collecting and depositing more soil onto the top of the seismometer cable, which is no longer visible close to the seismometer assembly. The sequence was taken on sol 877 of the mission (16 May).