After driving all around Mars with four rovers, NASA wants to look deep into the red planet with its InSight mission, scheduled for a 2018 lift-off
NASA’s next Mars mission known as InSight, which is scheduled for a 2018 liftoff, will focus on examining the deep interior of Mars, the U.S. space agency has announced.
The long form of InSight’s name is Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, reports Xinhua news agency.
The mission is expected to launch on May 8, 2018, from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with a Mars landing scheduled for October 2018, the agency announced on Monday.
Information gathered by the mission will boost understanding of how all rocky planets formed, including Earth.
“Because the interior of Mars has churned much less than Earth’s in the past three billion years, Mars likely preserves evidence about rocky planets’ infancy better than our home planet does,” Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of NASA, said in a statement.
The InSight mission was originally scheduled to launch in March 2016, but NASA suspended launch preparations in December due to a vacuum leak in the lender's prime science instrument. The instrument redesign and two-year delay add $153.8 million to its previous budget of $675 million.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems is assembling and testing the InSight spacecraft in a clean room facility near Denver, Colorado. The Mars lander’s science payload also is on track for next year’s launch.IANS
NASA’s next Mars mission known as InSight, which is scheduled for a 2018 liftoff, will focus on examining the deep interior of Mars, the U.S. space agency has announced.
The long form of InSight’s name is Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, reports Xinhua news agency.
The mission is expected to launch on May 8, 2018, from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, with a Mars landing scheduled for October 2018, the agency announced on Monday.
Information gathered by the mission will boost understanding of how all rocky planets formed, including Earth.
“Because the interior of Mars has churned much less than Earth’s in the past three billion years, Mars likely preserves evidence about rocky planets’ infancy better than our home planet does,” Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of NASA, said in a statement.
The InSight mission was originally scheduled to launch in March 2016, but NASA suspended launch preparations in December due to a vacuum leak in the lender's prime science instrument. The instrument redesign and two-year delay add $153.8 million to its previous budget of $675 million.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems is assembling and testing the InSight spacecraft in a clean room facility near Denver, Colorado. The Mars lander’s science payload also is on track for next year’s launch.IANS