Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
Mars is about to get its first internal checkup. The InSight lander, set to launch at 7:05 a.m. EDT on May 5 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, will probe the Red Planet’s innards by tracking seismic waves and taking its temperature.
Finding out what Mars’ interior is like could help scientists learn how the Red Planet formed 4.5 billion years ago, and how other rocky planets, including Earth, might have formed too. “It’s going to fill in some really big holes in our understanding of the universe,” says principal investigator Bruce Banerdt, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
Mars is the perfect planet for this project: It’s large enough to be geologically interesting and, like the Earth, has a core and mantle beneath its crust. But the Red Planet isn’t so large and geologically active that its crust is constantly changing and erasing evidence of what it was like in the past.
“It’s kind of the Goldilocks planet,” Banerdt says.
InSight — short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — was originally scheduled to launch in March 2016, but was pushed back because of equipment failure (SN Online: 12/23/15).
Assuming it reaches the surface of Mars in November, as planned, InSight will investigate the planet thousands of kilometers below the surface using two main instruments: a seismometer and a heat probe.
InSight will land in the flat, smooth plains of Elysium Planitia near the Martian equator. The spot provides relative calm, geologically speaking, and ample sunlight for powering the lander. The landing sites of previous Mars surface missions are shown as well.
The seismometer will measure seismic waves rippling through the planet, similar to the way geologists study the interior of the Earth (SN: 9/16/17, p. 11). These waves move at different speeds through different materials, so tracking the rate at which the waves move can help scientists paint a detailed picture of Mars’ insides.
“We have spent a lot of effort scratching at the surface of Mars, but InSight is one of the first missions really dedicated to exploring the other 99.9999 percent of Mars,” says planetary scientist Matthew Siegler…
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