It looks like the InSight Lander’s Mole instrument is making some progress.

After months of perseverance, the team operating the instrument has succeeded in getting the Mole at least some distance into the ground.

The Mole is the comfortable name for the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, or HP3.

The Mole will measure the increase of temperature with depth, called the geothermal gradient, and thermal conductivity.

The Mole was designed and built by the German Aerospace Center, or DLR, as their contribution to the InSight mission.

In May NASA announced that they were using the scoop on the end of InSight’s robotic arm to exert downward pressure on the Mole.

That was risky, since the Mole’s wiring harness is on the top, where the scoop needed to exert pressure.

A type of compacted soil called duracrust was preventing the hammering action of the Mole from penetrating the soil.

After several assists from my robotic arm, the mole appears to be underground.

We still need to see if the mole can dig on its own.

Using the instrument arm scoop to get the Mole into the ground is a victory of sorts, but the method has limitations?

Once it’s buried, the arm scoop can no longer apply any downward force to the submerged instrument.

Now the Mole has to resume the hammering motion that it uses to work its way into the ground.

Mission personnel saw this moment coming back in May, when they took the calculated risk of pressing down on the Mole with the instrument arm scoop.

They could use the method to get the Mole started, but now it’s up to the instrument’s self-hammering motion to drive the Mole deeper.

The Mole relies on friction between itself and the soil to drive itself into the ground.

If the Mole is now deeper than the problematic duracrust, there might be enough friction for the Mole to continue downward.

But there was no way to predict the duracrust, and what it meant for the Mole.