Mars lander on way to red planet
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A robotic geologist armed with a hammer and quake monitor rocketed toward Mars on Saturday, aiming to land on the red planet and explore its mysterious insides.
In a twist, NASA launched the Mars InSight lander from California rather than Florida’s Cape Canaveral. It was the first interplanetary mission ever to depart from the US West Coast, drawing predawn crowds to Vandenberg Air Force Base.
“Mars, here I come! 6 months and counting to the Red Planet,” the mission team tweeted.
“This is a big day. We’re going back to Mars!” NASA’s new boss, Jim Bridenstine, said following liftoff. “This is an extraordinary mission with a whole host of firsts.”
The spacecraft will take more than six months to get to Mars and start its unprecedented geologic excavations, traveling 485 million kilometers to get there.
InSight will dig deeper into Mars than ever before — nearly five meters — to take the planet’s temperature. It will also attempt to make the first measurements of marsquakes, using a high-tech seismometer placed directly on the Martian surface.
“That’s the real payoff of this whole mission and that’s still lying ahead of us,” said the mission’s chief scientist, Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Although fog prevented Banerdt from seeing the liftoff of the $1 billion US-European mission, he heard the roar of the rocket and all the blaring car alarms it set off.
“It was just an incredible moment,” Banerdt said. Despite the challenges still ahead, “I think I can bask in a little bit of satisfaction and just feeling like we really accomplished something today”.
Besides InSight, the United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket gave a lift to a pair of mini test satellites, or CubeSats, that are trailing InSight to Mars to serve as a potential communication link. Nicknamed WALL-E and EVE from the 2008 animated movie, the twin briefcase-size spacecraft popped off the rocket’s upper stage in hot pursuit of InSight, as elated launch controllers applauded and shook hands following the morning’s success.
Curiosity rover
NASA hasn’t put a spacecraft down on Mars since the Curiosity rover in 2012. The United States, in fact, is the only country to successfully land and operate a spacecraft at Mars. It’s tough, complicated stuff. Only about 40 percent of all missions to Mars from all countries orbiters and landers alike have proved successful over the decades.
If all goes well, the threelegged InSight will descend by parachute and engine firings onto a flat region of Mars believed to be free of big, potentially dangerous rocks on Nov 26. Once down, it will stay put, using a mechanical arm to place the science instruments on the surface.
Banerdt said Mars is ideal for learning how the rocky planets of our solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. Unlike our active Earth, Mars hasn’t been transformed by plate tectonics and other processes, he said. InSight might also help explain why some planets went on to develop life, while others did not.