Mars mission to study planet's interior launches in May

WASHINGTON — The next NASA launch will study Mars’ deep interior and even find out if the planet has Marsquakes.

NASA’s InSight — short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — is a stationary lander that is scheduled to launch in Vandenberg Air Force Base in California as early as May 5, according to a news release.

This is the first launch from the West Coast to another planet. Missions usually launch from the East Coast in Florida at Cape Canaveral.

This is the first mission dedicated to studying the red planet’s deep interior. Bruce Banerdt, the mission’s lead investigator, has worked more than 25 years to make this mission a reality.

The journey of 301 million miles to Mars takes about six months, according to NASA, and the mission will last two Earth years, or a little over one Mars year. It will take another 2-3 months to get the instruments in place and calibrated.

Banerdt said the data InSight will collect includes seismic data, heat flow data from beneath the planet and precision tracking of the north pole of Mars. He believes that InSight will have enough data after two years to meet its goal of mapping out the structure of the inside of Mars.

But, scientists will not have to wait that long because InSight will be beaming back data even on day one.

“If everything goes well we should get a picture on the very first day that we land on Mars,” Banerdt said.

The two-year mission could help scientists better understand how “rocky bodies form.” Banerdt described InSight as like a “scientific time machine that will bring back information about the early stages of Mars’ formation four-and-a-half-billion years ago;” and help scientists learn how Earth, its moon and other planets in other solar systems formed.

On Earth that evidence has been obscured erased by processes, such as plate tectonics and mantle convection, but on Mars those processes haven’t been active enough to erase those fingerprints of these early processes, Banerdt said.

“What InSight is going to do is, it is going to sort of fill in the last big hole in our understanding of Mars. We’ve sent orbiters to Mars which have studied the entire surface,” but what is missing is the rest of the planet. “Everything more than just a few feet below the surface is completely unknown territory. And InSight is going to fill in the gap in our knowledge of Mars and sort of finish the reconnaissance of the exploration of Mars,” Banerdt said.

InSight’s launch window is from May 5 to June 8.

Watch InSight scientists explain the mission.

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