Author: Matt Simon / Source: WIRED
The month-long launch window for NASA’s new Mars lander, InSight opens this weekend. InSight will be the first spacecraft to use a robotic arm to place its instruments on another planet’s soil—effectively unraveling the innards of the Red Planet. It’s also the first interplanetary mission to launch from the West Coast instead of Cape Canaveral, and it may not be the last.
InSight isn’t a rover, like Curiosity or Opportunity, but a stationary lander. Its mission is to peer deep into Mars with two main instruments. One is a probe that’ll hammer 16 feet deep to take the planet’s temperature and determine how much heat it’s losing. (That heat comes from the violent formation of a planet, but also the decay of radioactive elements.) The other is a seismometer for sensing marsquakes. Together, the instruments, which the robot arm will pluck from the deck of the spacecraft, will ideally show what Mars is made of, lending insight (sorry) into not just how the Red Planet came to be, but the history of other rocky planets in our solar system.
First, though, InSight has to get off Earth. Engineers stuck it atop an Atlas V-401 rocket, which stands nearly 200 feet tall and weighs in at 730,000 pounds, including the spacecraft. (By contrast, the world’s largest rocket, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, tallies a cool 3.1 million pounds. NBD.) It’ll launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base north of Los Angeles. Why snub Cape Canaveral in Florida, which is traditionally the launch site for interplanetary missions? Because the West Coast is no slouch, is why.
For one, things are busy on the East Coast, thanks in part to satellite-happy commercial outfits like SpaceX.
(Cape Canaveral is scrambling to accommodate all those launches, aiming to average a launch a week in the next five years.) Putting a satellite in orbit around our planet is one thing, but Mars spacecraft are extra complicated because they have to launch when the positions of Earth and the Red Planet are just right. “If it’s a planetary mission, you end up with a very short window you have to launch in,” says…The post Why Is NASA’s InSight Mars Mission Launching from California? appeared first on FeedBox.