All systems go for launch of InSight, a mission to reveal the inside of Mars
Scientists eager for answers to long-standing questions about the geology of Mars will get a lift Saturday with the blastoff from California of an Atlas 5 rocket with NASA’s InSight mission, a robotic landing craft that will take the pulse and temperature of the red planet.
With two experimental deep space communications relay CubeSats riding along, the InSight spacecraft and the Atlas 5 rocket are scheduled for liftoff at 4:05 a.m. PDT (7:05 a.m. EDT; 1105 GMT) Saturday from Space Launch Complex 3-East at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
InSight’s arrival at Mars is fixed on Monday, Nov. 26, 2018, when the robot will plunge into the Martian atmosphere, using a combination of a supersonic parachute and braking rockets to touch down with the aid of three shock-absorbing landing legs in Elysium Planitia, a broad equatorial plain with few boulders or craters that could pose a hazard during the spacecraft’s final descent.
Once on the Martian surface, InSight will unfurl solar arrays and place two instruments on the ground using a robotic arm to listen for tremors and measure the heat flow coming from the planet’s super-heated interior.
“In this mission, we’ll probe the interior of another terrestrial planet, giving us an idea of the size of the core, the mantle, and the crust, and our ability to then compare that to the Earth,” said Jim Green, NASA’s newly-appointed chief scientist, and former head of the space agency’s planetary science division. “This is of fundamental importance for us to understand the origin of the solar system, and how it became the way it did today.”
Full Article: https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/05/04/all-systems-go-for-launch-of-insight-a-mission-to-reveal-the-inside-of-mars/
I am a huge proponent of space exploration. We will some day colonize space. The possibilities for human advancement are infinite.
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