Going to Mars to understand Earth: NASA probe's next mission
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Los Angeles: NASA has launched many groundbreaking missions to Mars, but its next mission will do so literally.
The Mars InSight lander, planned for launch May 5, will be the first spacecraft dedicated to studying the deep interior of the red planet. The discoveries it makes could unlock hidden secrets about the structure of Mars, how it evolved and how other rocky planets – including Earth – came to be.
“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, and we’re going to do that by going to Mars,” said Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.
Short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, InSight will be the first spacecraft to land on a planet since Curiosity’s “Seven Minutes of Terror” on Mars in 2012. When it touches down November 26 in a flat plain just north of the equator called Elysium Planitia, it will unfurl its solar arrays and deploy a set of instruments designed to interrogate the planet’s insides.
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