The Color Cameras on the InSight Lander

Abstract

The NASA Mars InSight lander was successfully launched from Earth in May 2018 and is scheduled to land on Mars in November 2018. The key objective of the InSight mission is to investigate the interior structure and processes of Mars using a seismometer and heat flow probe that must first be placed onto the Martian surface by a robotic arm. The lander is equipped with two cameras to assist in this instrument deployment task. The Instrument Deployment Camera (IDC) is mounted to the lander robotic arm and will acquire images of the lander and surrounding terrain before, during, and after the instrument deployment activities. The IDC has a field of view (FOV) of $45^{\circ} \times45^{\circ}$ and an angular resolution of 0.82 mrad/pixel at the center of the image. The Instrument Context Camera (ICC) is mounted to the lander and will acquire wide-angle views of the instrument deployment activities. The ICC has a FOV of $124^{\circ} \times124^{\circ}$ and an angular FOV of 2.1 mrad/pixel at the center of the image. The IDC and ICC cameras are flight spare engineering cameras from the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission. The InSight project upgraded the inherited cameras from single-channel greyscale to red/green/blue (RGB) color by replacing the detector with a Bayer-pattern version of the same $1024~\mbox{pixel} \times1024~\mbox{pixel}$ detector. Stereo IDC image pairs, acquired by moving the arm between images, are critical for characterizing the topography of the instrument deployment workspace, a $4~\mbox{meter} \times 6~\mbox{meter}$ area located in front of the lander. Images from the cameras are processed using software from previous Mars surface missions, with several new image products developed for InSight to support instrument placement activities. This paper provides a brief description of the IDC/ICC hardware and related image processing.