The rover that could reveal the secrets of the red planet

NASA’s next Mars lander is almost ready for its mission to the red planet.

The spacecraft, dubbed InSight, is set to undergo its final round of tests following accelerated efforts this summer at Lockheed Martin’s clean room facility near Denver.

Once it arrives to Mars just after Thanksgiving next year, InSight will serve as the first lander fully dedicated to the study of the planet’s deep interior, with hopes it will uncover new clues on the processes that gave rise to all rocky planets.

According to NASA, the stationary lander will eventually be deployed to a region near Mars’ equator. After landing, its robotic arm will inject its two main instruments into the Martian surface

THE INSIGHT LANDER

The new lander is equipped with two solar panels, which unfold ‘like paper fans’ for a total width of about 20 feet.

After landing, its robotic arm will inject its two main instruments into the Martian surface.

These, NASA says, will become permanent fixtures in the ground.

The seismometer is sensitive enough to detect movement half the diameter of a hydrogen atom, and will record seismic waves from ‘marsquakes’ and meteor impacts.

And, a heat probe placed more than 10 feet beneath the surface will record energy coming from the planet’s deep interior.

InSight is expected to launch in 2018, during a five-week window beginning May 5.

It will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, marking the first interplanetary launch from the West Coast, according to NASA.

For now, though, assembly and tests are still underway at the Denver facility.

‘Our team resumed system-level integration and test activities last month,’ said Stu Spath, spacecraft program manager at Lockheed Martin.

‘The lander is completed and instruments have been integrated onto it so that we can complete the final spacecraft testing including acoustics, instrument deployments and thermal balance tests.’

According to NASA, the stationary lander will eventually be deployed to a region near Mars’ equator.

It’s equipped with two solar panels, which unfold ‘like paper fans’ for a total width of about 20 feet.

After landing, its robotic arm will inject its two main instruments into the Martian surface.

These, NASA says, will become permanent fixtures in the ground.

InSight is expected to launch in 2018, during a five-week window beginning May 5. It will take off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, marking the first interplanetary launch from the West Coast, according to NASA

The lander is equipped with two solar panels, which unfold ‘like paper fans’ for a total width of about 20 feet

DID ROCKY PLANETS FORM FROM MUD?

Scientists have widely accepted the idea that the planets formed from rocky asteroids – but, a study has now found that they may instead have been built from ‘giant convecting mud balls.’

According to researchers from Curtin University and the Planetary Science Institute, ice-filled grains of cosmic dust in the early solar system may have melted as they were subjected to radioactive heat, creating globs of water and dust that became the precursors to larger planetary bodies.

The researchers conducted computer simulations to analyze the movement of rock grains and mud in carbonaceous chondrite asteroids.

Carbonaceous chondrite asteroids are thought to be the building blocks of terrestrial planets, such as Earth.

While these objects would have had ice throughout their pores, and would have picked up fine grains of dust, the researchers point out that there were no processes present that would have lithified – or transformed to stone – the material once the ice melted.

So, ‘it would have been a mud, rather than a rock,’ they wrote in a paper published to Science Advances.

The seismometer is sensitive enough to detect movement half the diameter of a hydrogen atom, and will record seismic waves from ‘marsquakes’ and meteor impacts.

And, a heat probe placed more than 10 feet beneath the surface will record energy coming from the planet’s deep interior.

These instruments will gain unprecedented insight on the inner workings of the red planet.

According to NASA, radio transmissions sent between Mars and Earth will also help to study the planet’s core, based on perturbations in the way Mars rotates on its axis.

‘Because the interior of Mars has churned much less than Earth’s in the past three billion years, Mars likely preserves evidence about rocky planets’ infancy better than our home planet does;’ said InSight Principal Investigator Bruce Banerdy of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

NASA says the mission is now on track for the May launch, following setbacks that pushed it back from the initial launch date planned for March 2016.

The delay was the result of a leak into a metal container designed to maintain near-vacuum conditions around the seismometer’s main sensors.

This vessel has since been redesigned, and engineers installed the full seismometer instrument in July.

The Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument (left) underwent was assessed this past summer. On right, the top of the science deck of the lander with the mission’s seismometer instrument, heat probe instrument, robotic arm and other gear installed

Assembly and tests are still underway at the Denver facility. ‘Our team resumed system-level integration and test activities last month,’ said Stu Spath, spacecraft program manager at Lockheed Martin

‘We have fixed the problem we had two years ago, and we are eagerly preparing for launch,’ said InSight Project Manager Tom Hoffman, of JPL.

According to NASA, the best conditions for a launch to Mars occur about 26 months apart, based on planetary geometry.

And, this period lasts just a few weeks.

The effort, along with the instruments already on the red planet, are a step toward the space agency’s future plans of a manned mission in the 2030s.

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