- The mole vexing engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena is a scientific instrument known as the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, or HP3 — or just "the mole" — carried on NASA's InSight probe that landed on Mars a year ago.
I don't quite understand how this happened and I've been watching videos and reading write-ups for fifteen minutes. I guess the deepest we've ever dug into Mars is 6 inches yet we have this probe that we're pretty sure is going to dig itself fifteen feet down? It was designed in 1997 and was supposed to be on Beagle 2 in 2003. It seems like it's had a hard time getting a ride: I dunno. I've had a hell of a time driving a grounding rod three feet into my yard and I have a big damn hammer. Growing up in the desert we hit tufa three inches down. Kinda seems like this was a project that wasn't all that well researched in 1997 and has made the rounds ever since.HP3 was conceived by Gromov V. V. et al. in 1997, and first flown as the PLUTO instrument on the failed 2003 Beagle 2 Mars lander mission. HP3 evolved further and it was proposed in 2001 for a mission to Mercury, in 2009 to the European Space Agency as part of the Humboldt payload onboard the ExoMars lander, in 2010 for a mission to the Moon, and in 2011 it was proposed to NASA's Discovery Program as a payload for InSight Mars lander, known at that time as GEMS (Geophysical Monitoring Station). InSight was launched on 5 May 2018 and landed on 26 November 2018.