In May 2018, NASA launched the next mission
to Mars.
An Atlas 5 rocket took off from the Vandenberg
Air Force base in California; the very first
interplanetary launch from the West Coast.
Aboard the rocket are two cubesats, which
are the first of their kind for a Mars mission,
and a robotic lander.
The goal?
Touch down successfully and investigate the
deep interior
of Mars.
Over the decades, there have been a series
of critical missions to the red planet.
Flybys that took our first snapshots of Mars,
landers that characterized its atmosphere,
orbiters that studied its geology and climate,
and rovers that are investigating the presence
of liquid water.
The next phase is the Interior Exploration
using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and
Heat Transport or InSight.
Everybody has seen pictures of what the inside
of the Earth looks like - you see the core,
and the inner core.
We make pictures like that for Mars, but it's
just guessing.
This is the first time we're actually going
to know what the inside of Mars looks like.
We're using three processes: Seismometer,
Heat Flow, and Precision tracking.
The lander is outfitted with a suite of sophisticated
instruments, each with their own research
goal and acronym.
The seismic instrument is called SEIS.
That's Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure
that's going to be listening for marsquakes.
This seismometer is very, very sensitive.
If a butterfly lands on it and flaps its wing
it's going to detect it.
On Earth, most of the earthquakes we see are
driven by plate tectonics.
We don't expect to see that on Mars.
The seismology lets us look at how active
the surface of the planet is.
We can look at the way the waves vibrate,
which direction they vibrate, and we can use
that to determine which direction the quake
came from.
Next up is the Heat Flow and Physical Properties
Probe or HP3.
One of the biggest things that we need to
understand when we look at how planets evolve
is understanding what is happening with heat.
Most planets, you can think of them as heat
engines.
Everything they do involves how heat starts
out inside the planet and gets out.
We have what we call a heat probe that we're
going to dig deep into Mars.
That lets us know how Mars is evolving, how
it is changing over time, how it has held
on to the heat we can predict it had early
on in its history, and how much heat it has
now.
There's also the Rotation and Interior Structure
Experiment, or RISE, a precision radio science
instrument that’ll track the position of
the lander and help determine Mars’s core
is made of.
All of these instruments will be placed on
the planet with a 2.4 meter long robotic arm
that has four degree of freedom, a grapple,
a camera, and a second camera mounted underneath
the lander.
This is the first time we are going to do
position placement on Mars where we take an
instrument and install it on Mars and it's
going to be it's final resting place.
And we're doing all of this hundreds of millions
of miles away, blindfolded literally.
Right now, the InSight spacecraft is on a
six month cruise to Mars, tracked by NASA’s
Deep Space Network.
It’s tucked away inside an aerodynamic shell
and protective heat shield.
Once it reaches the point of descent, NASA
engineers will prepare for the difficult,
nail biting endeavor of landing Insight on
Mars, otherwise known as seven minutes of
terror.
Insight is not going to use the sky crane
technology to land on Mars.
It's going to have a parachute to slow it
down and to land with its retro rockets.
It’ll touch down in the Elysium Planitia,
about 373 miles from where Curiosity hangs
out.
It had to be close to the equator.
That's because this mission is solar powered,
and it needs to be powered all the time so
that the seismometer can always be running.
We still have no idea how our planets formed,
and by taking the vital signs of Mars, the
InSight mission will help us begin to understand
that.
This is pure exploration in a lot of ways.
We don't know these answers.
We have estimations, but it's going to surprise
us.
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