NASA craft set for Mars landing
InSight designed to dig into ground, sense ‘marsquakes’
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — Mars is about to get its first U.S. visitor in years: a three-legged, one-armed geologist to dig deep and listen for quakes.
NASA’s InSight will make its grand entrance through the rosetinted Martian skies on Monday, after a six-month, 480-millionkilometre journey. It will be the first American spacecraft to land since the Curiosity rover in 2012 and the first dedicated to exploring underground.
NASA is going with a triedand-true method to get this mechanical miner to the surface of the red planet. Engine firings will slow its final descent and the spacecraft will plop down on its rigid legs, mimicking the landings of successful missions.
That’s where old school ends on this $1-billion US joint American-European effort.
Once flight controllers in California determine the coast is clear at the landing site — fairly flat and rock free — InSight’s 1.8-metre arm will remove the two main science experiments from the lander’s deck and place them directly on the Martian surface.
No spacecraft has attempted anything like that before.
One experiment will attempt to penetrate five metres into Mars, using a self-hammering nail with heat sensors to gauge the planet’s internal temperature. That would shatter the out-of-this-world depth record of 2 1⁄2 metres drilled by the Apollo moonwalkers nearly a half-century ago for lunar heat measurements.
The astronauts also left behind instruments to measure moonquakes. InSight carries the first seismometers to monitor for “marsquakes” — if they exist.
It won’t be looking for signs of life, past or present. No life detectors are on board.
The spacecraft is like a selfsufficient robot, said lead scientist Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“It’s got its own brain. It’s got an arm that can manipulate things around. It can listen with its seismometer. It can feel things with the pressure sensors and the temperature sensors,” he said.
By scoping out the insides of Mars, scientists could learn how our neighbour — and other rocky worlds, including the Earth and moon — formed and transformed over billions of years. Mars is much less geologically active than Earth, and so its interior is closer to being in its original state.
But first, the 360-kilogram vehicle needs to get safely to the Martian surface. InSight will enter Mars’ atmosphere at a supersonic 19,800 kilometres an hour, relying on its white nylon parachute and a series of engine firings to slow down enough for a soft upright landing on Mars’ Elysium Planitia, a sizable equatorial plain.