NASA all decked up for InSight Mars Lander Launch; Watch this space for live coverage

California, May 5: While Californians are in deep sleep, NASA is all decked up for launching InSight spacecraft to Mars. Heading to the early morning launch, this happens to be the first mission to explore Mars' deep interior. All the best! 

InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), is scheduled to launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on a ULA Atlas V rocket.

This will be the first interplanetary launch from the West coast of the United States. Launching on the same rocket is a separate NASA technology experiment known as Mars Cube One (MarCO). MarCO consists of two mini-spacecraft and will be the first test of CubeSat technology in deep space.

The mission 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.

In two years that the InSight will attempt to answer questions about the planet's core, its crust, as well as marsquakes (derived from 'earthquakes'). These answers are expected to give scientists the vital clues into how Mars came to be, as well as help them underline the differences between the Red Planet and the Earth.

"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." 

Notably, the InSight was initially supposed to be launched in March 2016. However, due to a leak in the vacuum enclosure holding the seismometers, the launch got postponed. Since then, the enclosure has been fixed, with the current launch date being decided keeping in mind the alignment of the two planets.