NASA set to launch its InSight mission to Mars in few hours

Trying its best to put humans to Mars and learning more about the Red Planet, NASA is launching its Mars mission today that will investigate what’s happening beneath the planet.

NASA’s InSight Mars lander will be launched early morning on May 5 at approximately 7:05am EDT, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, atop an Atlas V rocket. If everything happens according to the plan, InSight will reach the Red Plant by November 26, 2018.

As Futurism explains, this lander will stay in one place close to Mars’ equator for its entire two-year journey, unlike other Mars rovers like Curiosity. Its focus will not be on the features of Mars surface, rather will be on what’s going on beneath it.

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The Mars lander’s will include a heat probe that will burrow 16ft into Mars for finding out how much heat moves through Mars’ interior. It will also contain a seismometer that will search for vibrations of meteorites that hit Mars’ surface and also the trembling of ‘marsquakes’. With these instruments, new information about Mars’ composition will be known, and the research team also wishes to learn more regarding the planet’s formation and other rocky planets close to it, including that of Earth’s.

Also, two tiny satellites, named CubeSats, will be launched besides the InSight Mars lander. When they arrive at the Red Planet, the two satellites will go their separate ways into the orbit around the planet to monitor InSight for a small time after its landing. They will communicate back to Earth from Mars.

“Even though we’ve had a lot of missions to Mars—orbiters and also landers and rovers crawling around on the surface—we’ve never had a mission that was devoted to looking inside Mars. InSight’s really unique in exploring the internal structure and composition of the terrestrial planets. There’s never really been one like this before,” expressed geophysicist Gerald Schubert not involved in the mission, reported by Phys.org.

If InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, succeeds, it will help answer most fundamental questions about the solar system.