[meteorite-list] Construction to Begin on NASA Mars Lander Scheduled to Launch in 2016 (InSight)

[Ron Baalke]

May 19, 2014
     
Construction to Begin on NASA Mars Lander Scheduled to Launch in 2016

NASA and its international partners now have the go-ahead to begin 
construction on a new Mars lander after it completed a successful Mission 
Critical Design Review on Friday.

NASA's Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat 
Transport (InSight) mission will pierce beneath the Martian surface to study 
its interior. The mission will investigate how Earth-like planets formed and 
developed their layered inner structure of core, mantle and crust, and will 
collect information about those interior zones using instruments never before 
used on Mars.

InSight will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, on the central California 
coast near Lompoc, in March 2016. This will be the first interplanetary 
mission ever to launch from California. The mission will help inform the 
agency's goal of sending a human mission to Mars in the 2030's.

InSight team leaders presented mission-design results this week to a NASA 
review board, which approved advancing to the next stage of preparation.

"Our partners across the globe have made significant progress in getting to 
this point and are fully prepared to deliver their hardware to system 
integration starting this November, which is the next major milestone for the 
project," said Tom Hoffman, InSight Project Manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion 
Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California. "We now move from doing the design 
and analysis to building and testing the hardware and software that will get 
us to Mars and collect the science that we need to achieve mission success."

To investigate the planet's interior, the stationary lander will carry a 
robotic arm that will deploy surface and burrowing instruments contributed by 
France and Germany. The national space agencies of France and Germany -- 
Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) and Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- 
und Raumfahrt (DLR) -- are partnering with NASA by providing InSight's two 
main science instruments.

The Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) will be built by CNES in 
partnership with DLR and the space agencies of Switzerland and the United 
Kingdom. It will measure waves of ground motion carried through the interior 
of the planet, from "marsquakes" and meteor impacts. The Heat Flow and 
Physical Properties Package, from DLR, will measure heat coming toward the 
surface from the planet's interior.

"Mars actually offers an advantage over Earth itself for understanding how 
habitable planetary surfaces can form," said Bruce Banerdt, InSight Principal 
Investigator from JPL. "Both planets underwent the same early processes. But 
Mars, being smaller, cooled faster and became less active while Earth kept 
churning. So Mars better preserves the evidence about the early stages of 
rocky planets' development."

The three-legged lander will go to a site near the Martian equator and 
provide information for a planned mission length of 720 days -- about two 
years. InSight adapts a design from the successful NASA Phoenix Mars Lander, 
which examined ice and soil on far-northern Mars in 2008.

"We will incorporate many features from our Phoenix spacecraft into InSight, 
but the differences between the missions require some differences in the 
InSight spacecraft," said InSight Program Manager Stu Spath of Lockheed 
Martin Space Systems Company, Denver, Colorado. "For example, the InSight 
mission duration is 630 days longer than Phoenix, which means the lander will 
have to endure a wider range of environmental conditions on the surface."

Guided by images of the surroundings taken by the lander, InSight's robotic 
arm will place the seismometer on the surface and then place a protective 
covering over it to minimize effects of wind and temperature on the sensitive 
instrument. The arm will also put the heat-flow probe in position to hammer 
itself into the ground to a depth of 3 to 5 yards (2.7 to 4 1/2 meters).

Another experiment will use the radio link between InSight and NASA's Deep 
Space Network antennas on Earth to precisely measure a wobble in Mars' 
rotation that could reveal whether Mars has a molten or solid core. Wind and 
temperature sensors from Spain's Centro de Astrobiologia and a pressure 
sensor will monitor weather at the landing site, and a magnetometer will 
measure magnetic disturbances caused by the Martian ionosphere.

InSight's international science team is made up of researchers from Austria, 
Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the 
United Kingdom and the United States. JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science 
Mission Directorate, Washington. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program 
of competitively selected mission. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in 
Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program. Lockheed Martin will 
build the lander and other parts of the spacecraft at its Littleton, 
Colorado, facility near Denver.

For more about InSight, visit:

http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov 

For more information about Mars missions:

http://www.nasa.gov/mars 

For more about the Discovery Program, visit:

http://discovery.nasa.gov 

-end-

Dwayne Brown
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1726
dwayne.c.brown at nasa.gov 

Guy Webster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6278
guy.webster at jpl.nasa.gov 

Gary Napier
Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver
303-971-4012
gary.p.napier at lmco.com