Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
NASA has chosen the preferred general landing site for its next mission to Mars, a lander that will examine the deep interior of the Red Planet to investigate how rocky worlds such as Earth, Mercury, and Venus evolved.
The project is known as InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), and according to the US space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) facility in Pasadena, California, it is currently scheduled to launch in March 2016.
InSight will lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, making it the first interplanetary mission to launch from California. The landing-site evaluation process that started in 2014 has picked four candidate locations in one site in the flat-lying “Elysium Planitia” region of Mars.
[STORY: Mars lander InSight has 4 potential targets]
All four locations in that site, which is located less than five degrees north of the equator, have been deemed safe for the spacecraft’s landing, and the exact region of this location where InSight will touch down will be announced later on this year. The preferred site is centered at roughly four degrees north latitude and 136 degrees east longitude, according to NASA.
“This is wondrous terrain, exactly what we want to land on because it is smooth, flat, with very few rocks in the highest-resolution images,” said InSight’s site-selection leader, Matt Golombek of JPL, which manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Detailed information about the candidate sites has been collected by the agency’s Mars orbiters, which have mapped them as landing ellipses about 81 miles (130 km) west-to-east by roughly 17 miles (27 km) north-to-south. An ellipse covers the area within which InSight has an estimated 99 percent chance of landing, if it aims for the center of the ellipse. Several types of terrain have been found in each, but the preferred location has the highest proportion of smooth ground.
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Once InSight reaches Mars, which should occur on or around September 28, 2016, the mission will begin assessing the properties of the planet’s crust, mantle, and core. The interior of Mars has not been churned as much as Earth’s because it lacks the tectonic activity that recycles the Earth’s crustal plates back into the mantle, NASA explained. For this reason, Mars provides a chance to find clues about the formation of rocky planets that no longer exist her on Earth.
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The primary science mission of the new lander will be to analyze the planet’s interior, not its surface features. In addition to ensuring a safe landing, the main site-selection criterion is for the ground within reach of InSight’s robotic arm to be penetrable for a heat-flow probe. That probe is designed to hammer itself into the soil down to a depth of three to five yards.
The Mars Odyssey orbiter’s Thermal Imaging System will assess that the ground in search of evidence proving it will be suitable for the probe. The process will measure how quickly the ground cools at night or warms in sunlight, and will also evaluate images captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
“The heat-flow probe is a key part of InSight’s Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) provided by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Electronics for that instrument were the first hardware from the science payload put onto the InSight spacecraft being assembled and tested at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver,” NASA said.
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“As flight components such as the HP3 electronics become available, our team continues to integrate them on the spacecraft and test their functionality,” added InSight spacecraft program manager Stu Spath of Lockheed Martin. “We’re steadily marching toward the start of spacecraft environmental testing this spring.”
A second science instrument, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, or SEIS, from the French Space Agency (CNES), will be placed on the ground by InSight’s robotic arm. A third will use the radio link between InSight and NASA’s Earth-based Deep Space Network antennas to precisely measure a wobble in the rotation of Mars that could determine if its core is molten or solid. Wind and temperature sensors from Spain and a pressure sensor, will monitor the planet’s weather, and magnetic disturbances will be tracked by a magnetometer.
The InSight mission passed its System Integration Review in February, and project manager Tom Hoffman of JPL said that an panel outside experts “reviewed the system-level integration and test program.” Multiple systems from several countries are being brought together for final testing and integration in Denver, he added. InSight was designed to provide data that will help NASA prepare for its planned manned mission to Mars in the 2030s.
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