ActivePaper Archive NASA to dig deep on Mars - The Age, 4/1/2018

NASA to dig deep on Mars

NASA has launched many groundbreaking missions to Mars, but its next mission will do so literally.

The Mars InSight lander, planned for launch on May 5, will be the first spacecraft dedicated to studying the deep interior of the red planet. The discoveries it makes could unlock hidden secrets about the structure of Mars, how it evolved and how other rocky planets – including Earth – came to be.

‘‘The goal of InSight is nothing less than to better understand the birth of the Earth, the birth of the planet that we live on, and we’re going to do that by going to Mars,’’ said Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.

Short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, InSight will be the first spacecraft to land on a planet since Curiosity’s ‘‘Seven Minutes of Terror’’ on Mars in 2012. When it touches down on November 26 just north of the equator called Elysium Planitia, it will unfurl its solar arrays and deploy a set of instruments designed to interrogate the planet’s insides.

Understanding Mars from within could help scientists better understand the evolution of other rocky planets, including Earth, as well as exoplanets far beyond our solar system. That’s because the Earth’s interior experienced much more churning than Mars’ did, erasing crucial information about what its insides used to look like.

Mars’ inner structure should more closely reflect that early stage of planetary evolution. ‘‘How we get from a ball of featureless rock into a planet that may or may not support life is a key question in planetary science,’’ Banerdt said. LA Times