{"id":13820,"date":"2018-05-05T01:35:36","date_gmt":"2018-05-04T17:35:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/all-systems-go-for-launch-of-insight-a-mission-to-reveal-the-inside-of-mars\/"},"modified":"2018-05-05T01:35:36","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T17:35:36","slug":"all-systems-go-for-launch-of-insight-a-mission-to-reveal-the-inside-of-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/all-systems-go-for-launch-of-insight-a-mission-to-reveal-the-inside-of-mars\/","title":{"rendered":"All systems go for launch of InSight, a mission to reveal the inside of Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
Artist\u2019s illustration of the InSight spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Credit: Lockheed Martin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Scientists eager for answers to long-standing questions about the geology of Mars will get a lift Saturday with the blastoff from California of an Atlas 5 rocket with NASA\u2019s InSight mission, a robotic landing craft that will take the pulse and temperature of the red planet.<\/p>\n

With two experimental deep space communications relay CubeSats riding along, the InSight spacecraft and the Atlas 5 rocket are scheduled for liftoff at 4:05 a.m. PDT (7:05 a.m. EDT; 1105 GMT) Saturday from Space Launch Complex 3-East at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.<\/p>\n

InSight\u2019s arrival at Mars is fixed on Monday, Nov. 26, 2018, when the robot will plunge into the Martian atmosphere, using a combination of a supersonic parachute and braking rockets to touch down with the aid of three shock-absorbing landing legs in Elysium Planitia, a broad equatorial plain with few boulders or craters that could pose a hazard during the spacecraft\u2019s final descent.<\/p>\n

Once on the Martian surface, InSight will unfurl solar arrays and place two instruments on the ground using a robotic arm to listen for tremors and measure the heat flow coming from the planet\u2019s super-heated interior.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this mission, we\u2019ll probe the interior of another terrestrial planet, giving us an idea of the size of the core, the mantle, and the crust, and our ability to then compare that to the Earth,\u201d said Jim Green, NASA\u2019s newly-appointed chief scientist, and former head of the space agency\u2019s planetary science division. \u201cThis is of fundamental importance for us to understand the origin of the solar system, and how it became the way it did today.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal of InSight is nothing less than to better understand the birth of the Earth, the birth of the planet we live on, and we\u2019re going to do that by going to Mars,\u201d said Bruce Banerdt, InSight\u2019s principal investigator from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.<\/p>\n

Saturday\u2019s predawn launch will be the first time a mission to another planet has left Earth from Vandenberg, the primary launch base on the West Coast.<\/p>\n

The 188-foot-tall (57-meter) Atlas 5 rocket, built by United Launch Alliance, will initially send the InSight spacecraft toward the south-southeast over the Pacific Ocean, with the booster stage\u2019s kerosene-fueled RD-180 engine generating around 860,000 pounds of thrust. The Atlas 5\u2019s Centaur upper stage will ignite its RL10 main engine, burning a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, two times to place InSight into low Earth orbit, then hurl the science probe toward Mars.<\/p>\n

The Centaur upper stage will release the 1,530-pound (694-kilogram) InSight spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, around 93 minutes after liftoff. Two briefcase-sized interplanetary CubeSats, part of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory\u2019s Mars Cube One technology demonstration mission, will spring out of carriers on the Centaur stage moments later to chart their own path toward the red planet.<\/p>\n

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The InSight spacecraft is cocooned inside the Atlas 5 rocket\u2019s payload fairing. Credit: NASA\/Bill Ingalls<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The twin Mars Cube One, or MarCO, nanospacecraft will become the first CubeSats to travel into interplanetary space, providing a radio relay capability to beam telemetry from InSight directly to Earth as the lander drops into the Martian atmosphere.<\/p>\n

But InSight does not need the MarCO CubeSats to make a safe landing. The entry, descent and landing maneuvers will be pre-programmed into InSight\u2019s on-board computer for the make-or-break arrival at Mars in November.<\/p>\n

A blanket of fog forecast at the Vandenberg launch site early Saturday may inhibit viewing of the Atlas 5\u2019s climb into space from nearby observation posts, but the reduced visibility is not likely to prevent liftoff, officials said Thursday.<\/p>\n

The Air Force levies a constraint for favorable visibility during an Atlas 5 launch to meet range safety requirements, but Air Force officials said they have workarounds to gather data on the rocket\u2019s trajectory after liftoff with other tracking assets. The fog would only become a problem if the other range safety capabilities were offline.<\/p>\n

Ground crews at the SLC-3E launch pad, perched on a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean, will switch on the Atlas 5\u2019s avionics late Friday for pre-flight checks, then retract the towering mobile gantry shortly before midnight, Pacific time, to reveal the rocket on its launch mount.<\/p>\n

The launch team will load cryogenic liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants into the two-stage Atlas 5 rocket during the final hours of the countdown.<\/p>\n

A final pre-planned hold in the countdown is scheduled at T-minus 4 minutes, giving managers time to complete final polls of the launch team before clocks resume at 4:01 a.m. PDT (7:01 a.m. EDT; 1101 GMT).<\/p>\n

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The InSight spacecraft pictured shortly before its enclosure inside the Atlas 5\u2019s payload fairing. The spacecraft is pictured here in cruise configuration, inside an aeroshell and heat shield. Credit: USAF 30th Space Wing<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

InSight has launch opportunities available every five minutes during Saturday\u2019s two-hour launch window. If technical or weather concerns prohibit liftoff Saturday, the mission has launch dates available through June 8, and still reach Mars on Nov. 26.<\/p>\n

See our list of InSight\u2019s launch windows through June 18.<\/p>\n

NASA\u2019s 20 previous Mars missions have all departed from Cape Canaveral, taking advantage of Earth\u2019s rotation by launching toward the east. The extra momentum gives rockets an additional boost.<\/p>\n

Vandenberg Air Force Base is typically host to launches into polar orbit, a type of orbit usually tailored for climate research missions, spy satellites and some communication applications.<\/p>\n

But InSight is small, with a mass well below the lift capability of the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, which will fly in its basic \u201c401\u201d configuration with a four-meter payload fairing and no solid rocket boosters.<\/p>\n

That means the Atlas 5 will not need the extra energy imparted during an eastward launch from Cape Canaveral, and ULA and NASA agreed to launch InSight from Vandenberg. The launch contractor proposed to base the mission from the West Coast because fewer Atlas 5 missions are scheduled from Vandenberg, so officials wanted to reduce the workload at ULA\u2019s busier launch base in Florida.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s one optimal launch time per day in order to get to Mars,\u201d said Jen Krupp, a ULA flight design engineer. \u201cWhile there may be on optimal launch time, we can achieve a two-hour launch window by steering slightly more inefficiently toward the edges of the optimal time in order to still hit the same target.\u201d<\/p>\n

The final burn of the Centaur upper stage will give InSight enough speed to escape the bonds of Earth\u2019s gravity, sending the spacecraft into the solar system on a trajectory mimicking the course the mission would have followed if launched from Florida.<\/p>\n

\u201cI use the baseball analogy for this one,\u201d Krupp said. \u201cFrom Florida, the baseball pitcher is throwing sidearm. they\u2019re going on an easterly trajectory going toward Mars, and they\u2019re throwing sidearm. For InSight, we\u2019re going to fly southerly in a polar mission, and (as) we come over the north pole, the pitcher is throwing overhand and releasing the spacecraft to Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n

To complete the analogy, sidearm and overhand pitchers can both deliver the baseball to a narrow strike zone 60 feet away. In InSight\u2019s case, the Atlas 5 can deliver the lander to Mars from either coast.<\/p>\n

Designers based the InSight lander on NASA\u2019s Phoenix probe, which launched in August 2007 and touched down on the northern polar plains of Mars in May 2008. Diminishing solar power and cold temperatures limited Phoenix\u2019s lifetime to about five months \u2014 two months longer than its three-month prime mission.<\/p>\n

InSight will head for a broad plain near the Martian equator with ample sunlight year-round, providing enough warmth and solar power to keep the mission operating for nearly two years, or a little more than one Martian year, and potentially much longer.<\/p>\n

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A map of the landing sites for all of NASA\u2019s Mars landers. Credit: NASA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Assuming the mission takes off Saturday, InSight will embark on a 301-million mile (485-million-kilometer) journey. Several course-correction maneuvers are planned during the trip, setting up for InSight\u2019s fiery descent through the Martian atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Employing a similar entry, descent and landing profile as the Phoenix mission a decade ago, InSight will approach the target landing zone in Elysium Planitia, with its heat shield absorbing blistering temperatures up to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, before unfurling a parachute and firing downward-facing rocket thrusters to settle to a gentle touchdown.<\/p>\n

Mission managers selected the nearly featureless landing target because of its safety. There are few surface hazards that could spell doom for InSight, and Banerdt, the mission\u2019s chief scientist, calls it the \u201cbiggest parking lot on Mars.\u201d<\/p>\n

InSight was originally supposed to launch in March 2016, but problems sealing a vacuum enclosure containing one of the lander\u2019s primary instruments, a French-developed seismometer, forced officials to postpone the mission. Mars launch opportunities come once every 26 months, when the planets are in the proper positions in the solar system, so the next chance to send InSight to the red planet opens Saturday.<\/p>\n

Engineers redesigned the vacuum enclosure to eliminate an air leak in a feed-through, or wiring interface, used route data between the seismic sensors inside the instrument and electronics and communications equipment aboard the InSight spacecraft.<\/p>\n

The protective enclosure keeps out wind and other environmental conditions that could disrupt the sensitive seismic measurements. It must keep a seal through the large day-and-night temperature swings on Mars.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of these feed-throughs was not capable of maintaining itself through the large temperature extremes,\u201d Banerdt said. \u201cWhen we actually tested at Mars conditions going down to minus 100 or minus 120 degrees Celsius (minus 148 to minus 184 degrees Fahrenheit), it developed a very tiny crack and started leaking \u2014 started allowing some air to come in.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was enough to upset the whole apple cart in terms of the sensitivity of the seismometer,\u201d Banerdt said.<\/p>\n

JPL took over responsibility for fabricating a new enclosure, while the French space agency, CNES, remained in charge of the instrument\u2019s internal sensors.<\/p>\n

The seismometer is now healthy, its enclosure sealed, and is ready for launch. The InSight spacecraft itself, along with a German-built heat probe sensor and the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, were all in position at Vandenberg for the March 2016 launch when NASA managers decided in December 2015 to keep the mission on the ground.<\/p>\n

The two-year delayed added roughly $150 million to InSight\u2019s cost, which now sits at more than $993 million, including launch and operations expenses. That figure includes an investment valued at approximately $180 million from the French and German space agencies.<\/p>\n

The twin MarCO spacecraft cost another $18.5 million, according to NASA.<\/p>\n

\"\"
InSight\u2019s solar panels deployed during a ground test. Credit: Lockheed Martin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One of InSight\u2019s first jobs will be to take panoramic pictures to survey the landing site, a region unexplored by past Mars missions. InSight carries cameras based on technology originally developed for the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers, but with added capability for color imagery.<\/p>\n

A nearly 8-foot-long (2.4-meter) robotic arm will place the seismometer and heat probe on the Martian surface next to the lander after touchdown. InSight\u2019s robotic arm was originally built for the canceled Mars Surveyor lander that was supposed to launch in 2001.<\/p>\n

Other leftover parts on InSight include a landing radar originally built as a spare for the Phoenix mission, and surplus structural booms from the Curiosity rover repurposed for a Spanish-built weather station on InSight to collect temperature and wind data.<\/p>\n

Once placed on the surface of Mars, the German-made Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, know as HP3, will hammer to a depth of 16 feet, or 5 meters, a process expected to take around six weeks with roughly 10,000 individual hammer blows, accounting for several planned pauses to allow the instrument to record thermal conductivity measurements.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you have an astronaut on the planet, you can do this in maybe 20 minutes or half an hour,\u201d Banerdt said of the heat flow experiment. \u201cBut if you want to do it robotically, you have to get a little bit more clever.\u201d<\/p>\n

The metallic mole will probe deeper into the Martian crust than any past lander.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think this remote probe can actually go down about 15 feet, which gives us a better baseline to measure the temperature increase with depth and be able to estimate the amount of heat coming out of Mars,\u201d Banerdt said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd that amount of heat is tied to the geological activity of the planet. It\u2019s the heat engine of the planet that drives volcanism, it drives tectonic activity, it drives mountain-building. So all the geological processes that happen on a planet are driven by its heat engine, and we want to measure sort of the vigor of that heat engine.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe switch on the temp sensors and record the temperature over depth and time for up to two years,\u201d said Tilman Spohn, HP3 investigation lead from DLR, the German Aerospace Center, in Berlin. \u201cTaking the temperature gradient, or the rate at which the temperature increases (with depth), gives us the heat flow. Very simple and straightforward, but as planetary science often is, very difficult. The devil is in the details.\u201d<\/p>\n

The seismometer will get to work listening for marsquakes.<\/p>\n

\u201cSensitive is really an understatement,\u201d Banerdt said of the seismometer. \u201cTt\u2019s an exquisitely sensitive device for measuring the motion of the ground. And when we talk about motion, we\u2019re talking about vibrations that have an amplitude comparable to the size of an atom.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are waves that were generated, maybe, by a marsquake on the other side of the planet, have traveled all the way through the planet, getting their waveform modified as they go through the planet and picking up information about the deep interior structure, and then we are able to pick it up when it comes back up to the surface under the seismometer,\u201d Banerdt said.<\/p>\n

\n
Spaceflight Now members can read a transcript of our full interview with Bruce Banerdt. Become a member today and support our coverage.<\/h6>\n
\n
<\/h5>\n

The seismic sensors aboard InSight evolved from mission concepts in the 1990s and 2000s that would have dispatched multiple small probes to Mars, creating a global geophysical network. InSight will give scientists just one seismic station, but experts have developed techniques to glean information about the interior of Mars, even with a single seismometer.<\/p>\n

Researchers have attempted seismic detections on Mars before, but seismometers on NASA\u2019s Viking landers in the 1970s provided inconclusive results. The instruments were mounted the decks of the landers, making them susceptible from interference from spacecraft vibrations and winds.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot only do you have to have a very sensitive device for measuring those motions but you have to protect it from everything else that might affect it,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have several different layers of protection, it\u2019s sort of like a Russian doll.\u201d<\/p>\n

An electrical and data cable will connect the seismometer to the InSight lander.<\/p>\n

Philippe Lognonn\u00e9, head of the InSight seismic investigation team at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris in France, said scientists do not have a confirmed detection of marsquake, but evidence suggests weak tremors occur on the red planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have no clear data on seismic activity on the planet,\u201d Lognonn\u00e9 in an interview with Spaceflight Now. \u201cWe imagine it because we see faults on the surface. In some places, we have seen where a boulder may have fallen down from a scarp. But again, we have no data.\u201d<\/p>\n

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One model for the interior structure of Mars. Credit: DLR<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Lognonn\u00e9 said, based on existing theoretical models, the seismometer could register around 20 or 30 quakes per year, sensing ripples from all types of seismic waves moving through the planet.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cover all the seismic waves, and we even have sensitivity to tides, the Phobos tide especially,\u201d Lognonn\u00e9 said. \u201cWe cover all the signals to be generated by a quake.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists will also measure Mars\u2019 polar wobble by analyzing radio signals transmitted between InSight and Earth-based antennas.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the timing of that signal, we can track the location of the spacecraft at Mars \u2026 with an accuracy of something around a foot or so, maybe a little bit less,\u201d Banerdt said. \u201cTo me, that\u2019s the closest we can get to magic with science.\u201d<\/p>\n

With that information, scientists can determine which way the Martian north pole is pointing as the planet rotates.<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the course of a year, we can watch the north pole wobble just a little bit because of the core sloshing around inside of the planet, and that will give us a very, very tight constraint on the size of that core and its density, and so its composition,\u201d Banerdt said. \u201cThat tells us the structure of Mars. The structure of Mars tells us something about the processes that put that structure together. We can put this into our mdoels, extrapolate it to Earth, and understand how the Earth formed four-and-half billion years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of the ancient geologic record on Earth has eroded away, but Mars may still hold clues about how it was born, accreted rock and dust, and formed a hot, high-pressure mantle and core as heavier elements sunk deep beneath its surface.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow we get from a ball of featureless rock into a planet that may or may not support life is a key question in planetary science,\u201d Banerdt said. \u201cAnd these processes that do this all happen in the first tens of millions of years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Discoveries made by InSight at Mars could inform scientists how the Earth formed and evolved.<\/p>\n

\u201cMars is a smaller planet,\u201d Banerdt said. \u201cIt\u2019s less active than the Earth, so it has retained the fingerprints of those early processes in its basic structure \u2014 the thickness of the crust, the compositon of the mantle, the size and composition of its core,\u201d he said. \u201cBy mapping out these boundaries, these various different sections of the inside of the planet, we can then understand better how the planet formed, and how our planet got to be the way it is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saturday\u2019s launch is just the first step in InSight\u2019s voyage to Mars. Launching a probe to another planet is not routine, but most scientists will have more butterflies when InSight approaches its destination late this year.<\/p>\n

Asked whether he will be more nervous during InSight\u2019s launch or landing, Banerdt replied: \u201cEDL (Entry, Descent and Landing), without a doubt \u2026 Launching a spacecraft, it\u2019s not that it\u2019s trivial because they\u2019re super-careful, and they\u2019ve got all these different bases covered, but they really know what they\u2019re doing. It\u2019s a lot more deterministic.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Atlas has an amazing success record of getting things into the correct orbit, the trajectory that it\u2019s planned for. I\u2019m reasonably confident.<\/p>\n

\u201cEDL is a whole different ballgame. It\u2019s such an incredible engineering challenge to land this tiny little spacecraft on another planet, which we know pretty well, but is still a pretty mysterious planet. EDL is always going to be the one point in the mission where I\u2019m just going to be white-knuckling it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Email the author.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @StephenClark1.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Artist\u2019s illustration of the InSight spacecraft on the surface of Mars. Credit: Lockheed Martin Scientists eager for answers to long-standing questions about the geology of Mars will get a lift Saturday with the blastoff from California of an Atlas 5 rocket with NASA\u2019s InSight mission, a robotic landing craft that will take the pulse and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[724,2964,927,1183,25,472,367,190],"class_list":["post-13820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-atlas-5","tag-av-078","tag-insight","tag-jet-propulsion-laboratory","tag-launch","tag-lockheed-martin","tag-mars","tag-nasa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13820"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13820"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13820\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}