Following the drilling missions of Mars rover Curiosity that started since its arrival in 2012, another state-of-the-art spacecraft is bound to puncture more holes on the Red Planet by March 2016 after NASA and its partners from across the globe received the much-coveted go signal to begin its elaborate construction.
As soon as a select panel of NASA approved the complete Mission Critical Design Review on Friday, the American space agency's next step is to carry out its plans to launch a single geophysical lander on Mars, a part of the NASA Discovery Program intended to study Mars' deep interior by piercing through the planet's crust.
Also known with its lengthy name Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, InSight will serve as the groundwork for the agency's bold step of sending astronauts to the Red Planet by 2030, NASA stated in a press release.
"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, project manager of InSight at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 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."
The three-legged lander will be an expedition of many firsts. Not only it would use an array of sophisticated geophysical instruments that are never before used in other Mars expeditions, it would also be the first interplanetary spacecraft ever to blast off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
"InSight is more than a Mars mission. It is a terrestrial planet explorer that will address one of the most fundamental issues of planetary and solar system science [and that is] understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago," said NASA on a website of its new Mars lander.
NASA and a roster of international space agencies have teamed up to assemble InSight's cutting-edge facilities while adapting a design of the successful Phoenix Mars Lander launched in 2008. To begin with, France's and Germany's respective space agencies have assisted in building Mars lander's robotic arm and two other main instruments.
In collaboration with the French government space agency, space agencies of European countries United Kingdom and Switzerland developed the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure or SIES, which will be used to record Mars ground motion, from "marsquakes" to meteor impacts. Meanwhile, the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package that is also from the Germany's aerospace center will gauge the heat emitted by planet's interior.
Upon arriving, InSight will trek towards the equator of Mars and would be in operation for about two years, NASA said.
