InSight lander (artist's concept) |
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| Operator | Under evaluation by NASA |
|---|---|
| Mission type | Lander |
| Current destination | Mars |
| Launch date | March 2016 (proposed) |
| Mission duration | 2 years |
| Homepage | http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov |
InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) — previously known as GEMS (Geophysical Monitoring Station) — is a proposed spacecraft mission. It would place a lander equipped with a seismometer and heat flow probe on Mars to reveal the earliest evolution of the solar system’s terrestrial planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars — and Earth’s moon. Inheriting technology from NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander and headed for a destination where spacecraft operations have been well tested, the InSight lander is a low-risk, low-cost mission with significant science implications across disciplines.
Managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) with participation from scientists around the world, InSight is one of three finalists chosen by the agency’s Discovery Program to complete a detailed mission concept study. The mission concept will go through a review in 2012 as the final stage of a proposal process designed to reveal the single mission that best meets the Discovery Program's goals. If selected, InSight would receive up to $425 million for mission development and launch.
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InSight will place a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep interior and address a fundamental issue of planetary and solar system science: understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago.[1]
InSight’s primary objective is to uncover the earliest evolutionary history of all the terrestrial planets in the solar system, including Earth, by conducting an advanced study into the processes that shaped Mars, a "veritable 'Goldilocks' planet."[1] Rocky bodies share a common ancestry that begins with a process called accretion. As the body increases in size, its interior heats up and evolves to become a terrestrial planet, containing a core, mantle and crust.[2] Despite this common ancestry, each of the terrestrial planets is later shaped and molded through a poorly understood process called differentiation. It is the InSight mission's goal to improve understanding of this process and, by extension, terrestrial plant evolution, by measuring the planetary building blocks shaped by differentiation: a terrestrial planet's core, mantle and crust.
The mission's secondary objective is to conduct an in-depth study of tectonic activity and meteorite impacts on Mars, both of which could provide knowledge about such processes on Earth.
The InSight lander will be deployed to Mars, one of the five terrestrial worlds in our solar system and a hot spot for a study into planetary formation. In terms of fundamental processes that shape planetary formation, Mars contains the most in-depth and accurate historical record, because it is big enough to have undergone the earliest accretion and internal heating processes that shaped the terrestrial planets, but small enough to have retained the signature of those processes.[1]
By studying the size, thickness, density and overall structure of the Red Planet's core, mantle and crust, as well as the rate at which heat escapes from the planet's interior, InSight will provide a glimpse into the evolutionary processes of all of the rocky planets in the inner solar system.
InSight’s science payload consists of two instruments:
In addition to the above instruments, an investigation called the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment (RISE), led by JPL, will use the spacecraft’s communication system to provide precise measurements of planetary rotation to better understand how Mars is built.
InSight is slated for a March 2016 launch date and set to arrive on the surface of Mars in late 2016.[1] Once InSight lands, it will spend two years investigating the planet’s internal processes and seismology using sophisticated geophysical instruments.
The InSight team includes scientists and engineers from multiple disciplines, countries and organizations. The science team includes co-investigators from the U.S., France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Japan, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
Mars Exploration Rover project scientist Bruce Banerdt, a planetary geophysicist with a career-long interest in the processes that change the surfaces of planets,[3] is the principal investigator for the InSight mission and the lead for SEIS. Suzanne Smrekar, whose research focuses on the thermal evolution of planets and who has done extensive testing and development on instruments designed to measure the thermal properties and heat flow on other planets,[4] is the lead for InSight's HP3 instrument. Sami Asmar, an expert in advanced studies using radio waves,[5] is the lead for InSight's RISE investigation. The InSight mission team also includes project manager Tom Hoffman and deputy project manager Henry Stone.[6]
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