 Hi. Welcome to Tinker Spark and today we're going to discuss the inside lander that just landed on Mars a couple of days ago. In case you're watching this in the future, the Mars inside lander landed on the 26th of November after a long seven month journey. It carries on it some of the most advanced robotics and tech on it. So let's discuss this. Well, there are actually two parts of the lander that make it really special. The first part is, you know, the robotic arm. It's a robotic arm that's 1.8 meters long. It has, you know, three degrees of movement and it uses a special camera to, you know, see where it's going. So what I mean by three degrees of movement or three degrees of freedom is that basically the three joints. So, you know, imagine your shoulder, this one joint here, elbow one joint here and wrist one joint. So it has three joints, almost identical to our arm, but it's 1.8 meters long, right? And it's a very, in fact, very similar to our arm as well. The two longest moment arms is this and this. So they're two really long arms and there's one small claw gripper that can go and pick up samples, right? So what this does is it uses a camera and the camera is really sophisticated because, I mean, you've got to do drop any senses, right? And we get to the senses in a minute, but the robotic arm, unlike other, you know, Mars expeditions that use such as curiosity or opportunity, that are physical, you know, rovers that can move around. Insight cannot move around. It's stationary. It's in one place, right? It doesn't have wheels. So the robotic arm is very important. It's used to pick up all the sensitive equipment and it's used, you know, to pick up samples and whatever they want to do, right? Any sort of adjustments, the robotic arm does everything. So it has a camera and a claw gripper to make sure that everything that it does is super precise and, you know, it prevents any mistakes from happening. So now let's talk about the actual instruments that the robotic arm picks and places on the Martian surface here to study various different things. The first instrument is the seismometer. And what that does is it basically detects any sort of vibrations. And why that's important is because we can detect stuff like Marsquakes. Similar to earthquakes, Marsquakes are just earthquakes on Mars. And basically what happens is that every time there's a Marscape or any sort of turbulence, that instrument can pick it up. What this tells us is, you know, what is Mars made of, what sort of tectonic plates are on it, how active is the core of Mars, etc. Furthermore, when there are, you know, dust storms or very turbulent wind or, you know, surface weather or climate, it can basically detect that and measure that, you know, how it affects it. And this is very important because if humans ever want to go to Mars, you know, then we need to know what sort of structures we need to build, what sort of conditions the structures need to withstand, etc. So this is deployed by the robotic arm and it sits just on the surface of, it's on a flat, simple surface. The second instrument is actually very interesting. It's actually this heat probe robot. And what it is, it's this little tiny drill, right? It's a very thin cylindrical drill. But what it does is it can drill into the ground, so it's going to drill about five meters down into the ground. But unlike a traditional, you know, robot that can drill fast, this will take a few months to drill because it's a slow process. And in fact, what this does is this robot is there to measure the heat, the thermal capacity of the soil. So how it works is basically you drill, drill, drill, drill into the ground, five meters down, and there will be ribbon connecting it to the inside lander. And what this ribbon has are tons of temperature sensors. And basically all along these temperature sensors can measure, you know, the variation of temperature. Okay, the surface temperature is this. As it goes down, this is how the temperature drops. And like another cool feature is that heat probe that drill all the way down, that can actually heat itself up. So it has a heating element, you know, almost like a mini heater. And you can check, okay, how much time did it take for the heat to travel up the soil? And, you know, what's the thermal capacity? And this can tell us tons of things like water materials, is the Martian ground made of. And, you know, just knowing what the Martian soil is like will help us, again, when we go to Mars, build structures that are, you know, suitable and strong and, you know, good for, and understand what sort of environment we're dealing with, especially if you want to, you know, support biology as in like growth crops or like, you know, do agriculture. So that's that. And something very interesting is in fact the heat probe robot, right, as it drills down, every so often it has to pause because as it's drilling down, it releases some heat, right, like the process of drilling will heat up the soil. So it has to keep pausing so the measurements are not thrown off. And another really fun fact is that the temperature sensors that are microscopic are very small. The temperature sensors can detect anywhere up to one milli Kelvin in terms of temperature variation. That's incredibly minute. So they're incredibly accurate sensors. And I mean, there should be. It's a multimillion dollar project that's being launched on tomorrow. So anyway, those are some of the really cool technological elements of the Mars inside rover. If you want to learn more about the robotics and more about the robotics and tech advancements of the inside rover, check out the full article on trinkets.