Sarah Lewin reports that NASA's next Mars lander, InSight, is set to launch May 5 at the earliest from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and it 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," said Bruce Banerdt, InSight's principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. "And we're going to do that by going to Mars, which seems a little bit counterintuitive."
Banerdt spoke during a NASA news conference Thursday (March 29) at JPL to discuss the upcoming mission, which is scheduled to launch between May 5 and June 8, and arrive on Mars Nov. 26. [In Pictures: NASA's InSight Lander to Probe Heart of Mars].
The mission, whose name is short for "Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport," is currently slated launch on May 5 at 4 a.m. PDT (1100 GMT) on United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket. 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 farther 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."
While Earth is an active planet, with plate tectonics and other processes scrambling its layers, Mars should have a cleaner slate. "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."
[We don't know why NASA doesn't admit that one of the real goals of the drilling and shallow seismic investigations is to determine if there exists shallow groundwater. If the Lander is located in a geographically (and topographically) low area or at the bottom of a crater, this is where shallow groundwater would be expected to occur near the surface. We'll see sooner or later].
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