NASA launches InSight spacecraft

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. >> 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 to depart from the West Coast, drawing pre-dawn crowds to Vandenberg Air Force Base.

“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 300 million miles to get there.

InSight will dig deeper into Mars than before, nearly 16 feet, to take the planet’s temperature. It will also attempt to make the first measurements of quakes, using a high-tech seismometer placed directly on the 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 La Cañada Flintridge.

Although fog prevented Banerdt from seeing the liftoff of the $1 billion U.S.-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 told The Associated Press.

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 Pixar 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.

NASA hasn’t put a spacecraft on Mars since the Curiosity rover in 2012. The U.S. is the only country to successfully land and operate a spacecraft at Mars.

If all goes well, the three-legged InSight will descend by parachute onto a flat equatorial region on Nov. 26.