# photo of the day | Martian sunrise and sunset through the InSight landing module

Mars landing moduleLast week, NASA's InSight aerospace agency took photographs of the Martian dawn and dusk, continuing the already established tradition of photographing the beginning and end of the Martian day. At one time, similar photographs were made by the Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity rovers.

"This is already a tradition for every mission to Mars -take photos of sunrises and sunsets on the Red Planet. Taking into account that most of the tasks assigned to the vehicles were completed, we decided that it would be nice to take photos of the sunrise and sunset on the surface of another world, ”commented Justin Maki, one of the participants of the InSight project from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) NASA in Pasadena (California, USA).

This photograph of a Martian sunrise was takenusing the Instrument Deployment Camera installed on the robotic arm of the landing module, on April 24, 2019 for 145 Martian day (Sol) missions

The color-corrected image above shows how a Martian sunrise would look to the human eye.

As noted by the official representatives of NASA,photos of the Martian sunset and sunrise the apparatus InSight made April 24 and 25. The sunrise was filmed around 5:30 am local Martian time. After about 13 hours, the camera, mounted on the robotic arm of the module, received a photograph of a Martian sunset. It is noteworthy that the beautiful gray clouds circling in the sky of the Red Planet also hit the frames.

The mission team published both RAW images and color corrected images.

It is impossible not to note another one in the photographs.An interesting detail is how small our Sun appears from the surface of Mars. This is explained by the fact that the Red Planet is located farther from the luminary than the Earth, therefore in the sky of Mars the size of our star is only 2/3 of the size that we can see from the surface of our planet.

InSight Mission (Interior Exploration usingSeismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, literally “interior research using seismic and geodesic methods and heat transfer”) worth $ 800 million landed near the equator of Mars last November. Its main task is to study the structural features of the soil of the Red Planet.

This snapshot of a Martian sunset was captured by the camera of the InSight landing module on April 25, 2019, at approximately 6:30 pm local Martian time.

The landing module is equipped with a SEIS seismometer andprobe HP3 heat flux, equipped with a drilling-shock system, dubbed the "mole". Using these tools, the device is able to determine the seismic activity on the planet, as well as to study in detail the heat fluxes in the soil of Mars.

Drilling machine still could not reachthe task assigned to it to go deeper 3-5 meters below the surface of Mars, stuck at a depth of only about 30 centimeters. The mission team is still trying to figure out what's stopping the borax from going further. According to the latest data, a solid layer of duricrust about 20 centimeters thick and consisting of sand particles stuck together can be on the site of the module landing. At the same time, last week, the mission team announced that the device had recorded the first marstosyenie.

Recall that the first spacecraftNASA descent vehicle with an automatic Mars station "Viking-1" became the one who shot the sunset on the surface of Mars. Photo was taken on August 20, 1976. The “twin brother” of the first module, Viking-2, was able to see the Martian sunrise on June 14, 1978.

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