The Atlas V carrying the InSight Mars lander is set to lift off on Saturday morning from Vandenberg AFB in California at 4:05 a.m. PDT (7:05 am EDT) (See earlier posting here.) The vehicle is scheduled to land on Mars in the western Elysium Planitia region at around noon Pacific time on Monday, Nov. 26th.
A ULA Atlas V rocket is ready for launch this Saturday morning to send the Insight Lander to Mars, where it will use a seismograph and other instruments to study the interior of the Red Planet. Liftoff is set for 7:05 am EDT (4:05 am PDT, 1105 GMT). NASA TV coverage of the launch from Vandenberg AFB in California will start at 6:30 am EDT. On Thursday at 4:00 pm EDT, NASA TV will broadcast a pre-launch briefing about the mission.
InSight will be the first mission to peer deep beneath the Martian surface, studying the planet’s interior by measuring its heat output and listening for marsquakes, which are seismic events similar to earthquakes on Earth. It will use the seismic waves generated by marsquakes to develop a map of the planet’s deep interior. The resulting insight into Mars’ formation will help us better understand how other rocky planets, including Earth, were and are created.
JPL manages the InSight mission for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. InSight is part of NASA’s Discovery Program, managed by the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The spacecraft, including cruise stage and lander, was built and tested by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver.
Several European partners, including France’s space agency, the Centre National d’Étude Spatiales, and Germany’s DLR, are supporting the mission.
Here is an overview of the mission from NASA:
Lockheed-Martin was the lead contractor building the spacecraft:
Here is a science briefing on the mission held back in March:
The Planetary Society‘s “Planetary Post with Robert Picardo” reports from the spacecraft clean room:
Curiosity’s exploration of Vera Rubin Ridge is extended, while an attempt by Opportunity to climb back up Perseverance Valley to reach an interesting rock outcrop fails.
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Here is an overview of NASA JPL’s goal of one day bringing back a sample of Martian soil to earth:
Here is a new video from NASA JPL about a plan to return a sample of Martian soil to the earth:
And here is a video of a recent public lecture at the SETI Institute giving an overview of Mars research plans:
Three SETI Institute planetary scientists who have dedicated their career to the study of the red planet will tell us what we have learned from those studies, and what the next steps are in the exploration of Mars with the next generation of rovers. Janice Bishop will introduce the candidate landing sites for upcoming martian rovers. She will focus on the mineralogy determined from the CRISM spectrometer at Mars and what that can tell us about Mars’ early environment. Ginny Gulick will describe the fluvial morphology/water history of these sites as seen by the HiRISE and CTX cameras. Finally, Pablo Sobron will address the instruments scheduled for the Mars2020 and ExoMars rovers and how SuperCam, Sherlock and the ExoMars Raman/LIBS instrument will be used to explore mineralogy and organics at the future landing sites.
On May 5, a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is scheduled to launch NASA’s InSight mission to Mars from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Insight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport)
will study the deep interior of Mars to learn how all rocky planets formed, including Earth and its moon. The lander’s instruments include a seismometer to detect marsquakes and a probe that will monitor the flow of heat in the planet’s subsurface.
Here is a short video about the mission, which will reach Mars in November:
And another video of a panel discussion about the mission. The panel participants included: :
• Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington
• Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at JPL
• Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager at JPL
• Jaime Singer, InSight instrument deployment lead at JPL
NASA is about to go on a journey to study the center of Mars.
The space agency held a news conference today at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, detailing the next mission to the Red Planet.
InSight — short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — is a stationary lander scheduled to launch as early as May 5. It will be the first mission ever dedicated to Mars’ deep interior, and the first NASA mission since the Apollo moon landings to place a seismometer on the soil of another planet.
For JPL’s Bruce Banerdt, it’s also a labor of love. Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator, has worked for more than 25 years to make the mission a reality.
“In some ways InSight is like a scientific time machine that will bring back information about the earliest stages of Mars’ formation four-and-a-half billion years ago,” Banerdt said. “It will help us learn how rocky bodies form, including Earth, its moon and even planets in other solar systems.”
Scientists hope that by detecting marsquakes and other phenomena inside the planet, InSight can better understand how Mars formed. InSight carries a suite of sensitive instruments to gather these data; unlike a rover mission, they require a spacecraft that sits still and carefully places its instruments on the Martian surface.
NASA isn’t the only agency excited about the mission. Several European partners contributed instruments, or instrument components, for the InSight mission. For example, France’s Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) led a multinational team that built an ultra-sensitive seismometer for detecting marsquakes. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) developed a thermal probe that can bury itself up to 16 feet (5 meters) underground and measure heat flowing from inside the planet.
“InSight is a truly international space mission,” said Project Manager Tom Hoffman of JPL. “Our partners have delivered incredibly capable instruments that will make it possible to gather unique science after we land.”
Looking deep into Mars will let scientists understand how different its crust, mantle and core are from their counterparts on Earth. In a sense, Mars is the exoplanet next door: a nearby example of how gas, dust and heat combine and arrange themselves into a planet.
InSight is currently at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California undergoing final preparation before launch. On Wednesday, it completed what’s known as a spin test: the entire spacecraft is rotated at high speeds to confirm its center of gravity.
That’s critical for its entry, descent and landing on Mars in November, Hoffman said. In the next month, the spacecraft will be mounted to its rocket, connections between them will be checked, and the launch team will go through a final training.
“This next month will be exciting,” Banerdt said. “We’ve got some final work to do, but we’re almost ready to go to Mars.”
JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the InSight Project for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space, Denver, built and tested the spacecraft. InSight is part of NASA’s Discovery Program, which is managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.