NASA is about to go on a journey to study the center of Mars.
The space agency held a news conference today at its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, detailing the next mission to the Red Planet.
InSight — short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — is a stationary lander scheduled to launch as early as May 5. It will be the first mission ever dedicated to Mars’ deep interior, and the first NASA mission since the Apollo Moon landings to place a seismometer on the soil of another planet.
For JPL’s Bruce Banerdt, it’s also a labor of love. Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator, has worked for more than 25 years to make the mission a reality.
“In some ways InSight is like a scientific time machine that will bring back information about the earliest stages of Mars’ formation four-and-a-half billion years ago,” Banerdt said. “It will help us learn how rocky bodies form, including Earth, its moon and even planets in other solar systems.” [More at link]