NASA's next Mars lander ‘InSight’ on mission to understand our Earth

NewsBharati    30-Mar-2018
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California, March 30: NASA's next Mars lander InSight, set to launch May 5 at earliest from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, will bring a trio of powerful instruments to measure the wobbles, quakes and heat that reveal what's going on deep inside the Red Planet — and perhaps offer insight into how Earth formed, as well. 

"The goal of InSight is nothing less than to better understand the birth of the Earth, the birth of the planet that we live on," Bruce Banerdt, InSight's principal investigator at JPL. "And we're going to do that by going to Mars, which seems a little bit counter-intuitive."

Banerdt spoke during a NASA news conference Thursday at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California to discuss the upcoming mission, which is scheduled to launch between May 5 to June 8, and arrive on Mars Nov. 26.

The mission, whose name is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is currently slated launch at 4 a.m. PDT on United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket on May 5. That means skywatchers along California's coast, from Santa Maria to San Diego, should be able to see the launch if skies are clear, NASA officials said — and it may be visible further down the coast as well.

When InSight arrives at Mars, the spacecraft will spend a dramatic 7 minutes decelerating from 12,500 mph (20,000 km/h) to just 5 mph (8 km/h) before dropping down on the surface, Banerdt said. Then, over a matter of months, it will lower its instruments to the surface to begin its investigation.

"How we get from a ball of featureless rock into a planet that may or may not support life is a key question in planetary science, and these processes that do this all happen in the first tens of millions of years, which is just a few seconds at the beginning of the life of a planet that lasts 4.5 billion years," Banerdt said. "We'd like to be able to understand what happened, and the clues to that are in the structure of the planet that gets set up in these early years."

"Mars is a smaller planet, it's less active than the Earth, and so it has retained the fingerprints of those early processes in its basic structure," Banerdt said. "The thickness of the crust, the composition of the mantle, the size and composition of its core; by mapping out these boundaries, these various different sections of the inside of the planet, we can then understand better how the planet formed and how our planet got to be the way it is."

“InSight is a truly international space mission,” said Tom Hoffman, project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Our partners have delivered incredibly capable instruments that will make it possible to gather unique science after we land,” Hoffman said.

InSight currently is at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California undergoing final preparation before launch, NASA said. This week, it completed what is known as a spin test: the entire spacecraft is rotated at high speeds to confirm its centre of gravity. That is critical for its entry, descent and landing on Mars in November, Hoffman said.