In a first for the West Coast, an Atlas 5 rocket boosted a robotic Mars lander into space Saturday, the first step in a six-and-a-half month voyage to the red planet for a two-year, $1 billion mission to monitor marsquakes, probe the temperature of the core and map the planet's hidden interior.

With heavy fog blanketing Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles, the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5's first stage engine thundered to life at 4:05 a.m. PT (GMT-7; 7:05 a.m. ET), throttled up to full thrust and quickly pushed the 20-story-tall booster away from pad 3-East atop 860,000 pounds of thrust.

It was the first interplanetary launch from the West Coast, but fog blocked the view for spectators near the launch site as the rocket climbed away to the south over the Pacific Ocean. Long-range cameras, however, captured spectacular views as the rocket streaked away, trailing a brilliant plume of fiery exhaust.

The Atlas 5 did its job despite the fog -- a visibility guideline was waived by mission managers with all other systems "go" for flight -- and 13 minutes after liftoff, the rocket's Centaur second stage completed the first of two firings to put NASA's InSight Mars lander in a temporary parking orbit.

The InSight lander is the first spacecraft devoted solely to studying the interior of Mars. In this artist's impression, two of the lander's primary instruments -- a sensitive seismometer with a dome-shaped weather shield and a sub-surface heat probe can be seen deployed on the surface. NASA

A second burn a little more than an hour later boosted the spacecraft out of Earth's gravitational clutches, putting InSight onto the planned trajectory to Mars. If all goes well, the lander will reach Mars in 205 days, touching down on a broad plain known as Elysium Palitia on Nov. 26.

"This is a big day, we're going back to Mars," said new NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "We did it from the West Coast, which is a first ever. We're going to look deep inside the interior of Mars, we're going to create a 3D image of what's going on inside of Mars.

"This is an extraordinary mission with a whole host of firsts. It's important for our country, it's also important for the world. It really establishes American leadership in a lot of ways. ... Congratulations to everyone involved."

InSight is the eighth lander NASA has sent to Mars. Since 1964, the United States has now launched 23 robotic spacecraft to the red planet at a cost of more than $20 billion in an evolving campaign to map out the red planet's surface, determine the role of water in its history and to search for signs of past habitability and the organic building blocks of life.

InSight is the first mission dedicated solely to learning more about the planet's interior in an attempt to glean clues about how rocky terrestrial planets like Earth formed during the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

"The 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're going to do that by going to Mars," said Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator of the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- InSight -- mission.

"How we get from a ball of featureless rock into a planet that may or may not support life is a key question," he said.

Earth is a very geologically active world, and much of the early record has been destroyed by continental drift and the churning of the mantle. As a result, "we're kind of at a loss to see, on the Earth, what's the evidence for what happened in those early years," Banerdt said.

The exhaust plume of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket billows out in spectacular fashion as the booster propels NASA's InSight Mars lander out of the thick lower atmosphere following launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. InSight is the first mission devoted solely to studying the interior of the red planet to learn more about the processes that gave birth to Earth and other terrestrial worlds. NASA

"But we can go to Mars. Mars is a smaller planet, it is less active than the Earth, and so it has retained the fingerprints of those early processes in its basic structure -- the thickness of the crust, the composition of the mantle, the size and composition of its core.

"And by 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."

InSight is equipped with two primary instruments: the Seismic Experiment Interior Structure -- SEIS -- seismometer, provided by the French space agency, CNES, and the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe -- HP3 -- provided by the German Aerospace Agency, DLR. The two instruments cost the European space agencies about $180 million.

After a detailed photo survey of the surrounding terrain near the lander and repeated rehearsals on Earth, a robot arm on InSight's upper deck will be commanded to pick up both instruments and lower them to the surface.

The seismometer "is really the heart of the InSight mission," Banerdt said. "The seismometer is what allows us to see deep into the planet, to have insight into the planet, and it uses the seismic waves that are generated by marsquakes."

The instrument, protected from the elements by a dome-shaped shield, is capable of measuring movements smaller than the width of a hydrogen atom. As seismic waves from marsquakes travel through the martian interior, they will pass through different types of rock and soil that will alter their shape.

The InSight Mars lander, with its circular solar arrays deployed, during pre-flight testing. The seismometer's weather shield can be seen on the upper deck. NASA

"Scientists understand how to take the shapes of those wiggles, their frequency, their amplitude, the polarization, the timing, all kinds of properties of those waves and pull that information out and finally, after we've gotten many, many marsquakes from different directions, we can put together a three-dimensional view of the inside of Mars," Banerdt said.

The heat probe will use a motor and spring-driven hammer mechanism to pound its way down into the martian soil trailing a cable with sensitive temperature sensors. Pausing along the way to measure the thermal conductivity of the soil at different points, the probe could reach a maximum depth of about 15 feet.

The sensors on the trailing cable will measure slight differences in temperature between the surface and the probe's maximum depth, allowing scientists to extrapolate temperatures all the way to the core 2,000 miles below.

InSight's third investigation relies on the lander's radio system. By carefully analyzing slight changes in the radio signals from the spacecraft as Mars rotates on its axis and sweeps along its orbit, scientists can precisely locate the martian polar axis and measure how it slowly changes orientation.

"Over the course of a year, we can watch that north pole wobble just a little bit because of the core sloshing around inside the planet," Banerdt said. "And that will give us a very, very tight constraint on the size of that core, its density and so its composition."

"That tells us the structure of Mars, the structure of Mars tells us something about the processes that put that structure together, we can put that into our models, extrapolate to the Earth and understand how the Earth formed four and a half billion years ago. And that's really the crux of the science behind this mission."</s>In a first for the West Coast, an Atlas 5 rocket boosted a robotic Mars lander into space Saturday, the first step in a 171-day voyage to the red planet for a two-year, $1 billion mission to monitor marsquakes, probe the temperature of the core and map the planet's hidden interior.

With heavy fog blanketing Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles, the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5's first stage engine thundered to life at 4:05 a.m. PT (GMT-7; 7:05 a.m. ET), throttled up to full thrust and quickly pushed the 20-story-tall booster away from pad 3-East atop 860,000 pounds of thrust.

It was the first interplanetary launch from the West Coast, but fog blocked the view for spectators near the launch site as the rocket climbed away to the south over the Pacific Ocean. Long-range cameras, however, captured spectacular views as the rocket streaked away, trailing a brilliant plume of fiery exhaust.

The Atlas 5 did its job despite the fog -- a visibility guideline was waived by mission managers with all other systems "go" for flight -- and 13 minutes after liftoff, the rocket's Centaur second stage completed the first of two firings to put NASA's InSight Mars lander in a temporary parking orbit.

A second burn a little more than an hour later was planned to boost the spacecraft out of Earth's gravitational clutches, putting InSight onto a trajectory to Mars. If all goes well, the lander will touch down on a broad plain known as Elysium Palitia around 2 p.m. local time on Nov. 26.

InSight is the eighth lander NASA has sent to Mars. Since 1964, the United States has now launched 23 robotic spacecraft to the red planet at a cost of more than $20 billion in an evolving campaign to map out the red planet's surface, determine the role of water in its history and to search for signs of past habitability and the organic building blocks of life.

InSight is the first mission dedicated solely to learning more about the planet's interior in an attempt to glean clues about how rocky terrestrial planets like Earth formed during the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

"The 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're going to do that by going to Mars," said Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator of the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- InSight -- mission.

"How we get from a ball of featureless rock into a planet that may or may not support life is a key question," he said.

Earth is a very geologically active world, and much of the early record has been destroyed by continental drift and the churning of the mantle. As a result, "we're kind of at a loss to see, on the Earth, what's the evidence for what happened in those early years," Banerdt said.

"But we can go to Mars. Mars is a smaller planet, it is less active than the Earth, and so it has retained the fingerprints of those early processes in its basic structure -- the thickness of the crust, the composition of the mantle, the size and composition of its core.

"And by 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."

InSight is equipped with two primary instruments: the Seismic Experiment Interior Structure -- SEIS -- seismometer, provided by the French space agency, CNES, and the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe -- HP3 -- provided by the German Aerospace Agency, DLR. The two instruments cost the European space agencies about $180 million.

After a detailed photo survey of the surrounding terrain near the lander and repeated rehearsals on Earth, a robot arm on InSight's upper deck will be commanded to pick up both instruments and lower them to the surface.

The seismometer "is really the heart of the InSight mission," Banerdt said. "The seismometer is what allows us to see deep into the planet, to have insight into the planet, and it uses the seismic waves that are generated by marsquakes."

The instrument, protected by the elements by a down-shaped shield, is capable of measuring movements smaller than the width of a hydrogen atom. As seismic waves from marsquakes travel through the martian interior, they will pass through different types of rock and soil that will alter their shape.

"Scientists understand how to take the shapes of those wiggles, their frequency, their amplitude, the polarization, the timing, all kinds of properties of those waves and pull that information out and finally, after we've gotten many, many marsquakes from different directions, we can put together a three-dimensional view of the inside of Mars," Banerdt said.

The heat probe will use a motor and spring-driven hammer mechanism to pound its way down into the martian soil trailing a cable with sensitive temperature sensors. Pausing along the way to measure the thermal conductivity of the soil at different points, the probe could reach a maximum depth of about 15 feet.

The sensors on the trailing cable will measure slight differences in temperature between the surface and the probe's maximum depth, allowing scientists to extrapolate temperatures all the way to the core 2,000 miles below.

InSight's third investigation relies on the lander's radio system. By carefully analyzing slight changes in the radio signals from the spacecraft as Mars rotates on its axis and sweeps along its orbit, scientists can precisely locate the martian polar axis and measure how it slowly changes orientation.

"Over the course of a year, we can watch that north pole wobble just a little bit because of the core sloshing around inside the planet," Banerdt said. "And that will give us a very, very tight constraint on the size of that core, its density and so its composition."

"That tells us the structure of Mars, the structure of Mars tells us something about the processes that put that structure together, we can put that into our models, extrapolate to the Earth and understand how the Earth formed four and a half billion years ago. And that's really the crux of the science behind this mission."</s>In this still image taken from NASATV, the exhaust plume of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas-V rocket with the NASA InSight spacecraft is seen as the rocket launches on May 5, 2018, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — With the orange flames of its engine lighting up the foggy sky for miles around, a car-sized Mars lander rocketed into space early Saturday in a first-of-its-kind launch from California on a mission to probe beneath the surface of the Red Planet.

The nearly $1 billion Mars InSight probe blasted off shortly after 4 a.m. local time, roaring south down the coast to the delight of crowds gathered on beaches and church parking lots to watch in the pre-dawn darkness. The lander's two-year mission aims to understand what makes the Red Planet like Earth and help advance the search for new homes for our species.

"It's unbelievable. It's literally unbelievable. I just stand here in awe," said InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt a few minutes before launch. Banerdt has been shepherding the project for nearly a decade, through construction and a scrubbed 2016 launch due to an equipment failure. Scientists had to wait two years until Mars and the Earth aligned again so the probe could start its approximately 200-day journey

This was NASA’s first interplanetary launch from the West Coast, a decision made in large part because Vandenberg’s launch pads are less busy than the ones at Cape Canaveral’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The Atlas 5 rocket carrying the Mars InSight probe launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base, as seen from the San Gabriel Mountains more than 100 miles away, on May 5, 2018 near Los Angeles, California.

InSight’s main mission is to check for quakes beneath Mars’ surface, which will help us learn how our solar system was created and lay the groundwork for similar exploration of potentially habitable planets elsewhere in the universe. Although Earth and Mars are generally formed of the same material, scientists want to know why the two planets ended up different. In addition to science experiments, the lander also carries two tiny silicon wafers engraved with the names of 2.4 million people who signed up via a public awareness campaign.

InSight is expected to reach Mars around Thanksgiving of this year, hitting the thin Martian atmosphere at about 13,200 mph, and then slowing down through friction, a parachute, and then right before reaching the surface, with thrusters. Even if the probe reaches Mars, there’s no guarantee of success: Missions to the Red Planet have just a 40% success rate, NASA said.

"The scary part is when we get to Mars," said Tom Hoffman, the InSight project manager for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "You never know what Mars is going to throw at you."

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas-V rocket with the NASA InSight spacecraft onboard is seen on May 5, 2018, shortly after the mobile service tower was rolled back late 04 May 2018, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, USA.

Federal taxpayers have provided about $813 million for the lander, with another $180 million from Germany and France. JPL also funded an additional $18.5 million to test two shoebox-sized “cubesats” that can act like cellphone towers, relaying information from the lander back to Earth. Those cubesats use inexpensive off-the-shelf technology and will help monitor the lander’s descent. If all goes well, this will be the first time cubesats have been used anywhere but in Earth orbit and could lay the groundwork for their use in other space exploration as humans expand our search of the stars.

By early 2019, scientists hope InSight’s instruments will be reporting back everything from how often the planet quakes to how warm the soil is, thanks to a probe designed to burrow nearly 20 feet below ground. That probe will be “picked” off the top of the lander by a robotic arm, the first time one has been used on another planet. Color cameras will photograph the area around the lander, which was built to withstand temperatures as low as minus-148 degrees below zero. Because Mars is geologically more stable than Earth, its interior may hold answers that have been erased here at home.</s>Note: Union Space Correspondent Roger Eckart recently traveled to Vandenberg Air Force Base, from which the InSight lander will be launched to Mars on an Atlas V-401 rocket this Saturday, May 5, and checked it out. First of two parts. – Ed.

VANDENBERG AFB – The prep is pretty intense. A lot of it is about anticipation.

We are first given a 30-minute tutorial about Planet Protection, PP it’s called in NASA speak. Basically it boils down to keeping Earth bugs off Mars and Mars bugs off Earth.

Despite a transit at extremely cold temperatures and lack of any atmosphere Earth’s “bacterial endospores” can survive on all of our interplanetary probes.

This can be especially problematic on landers. If we are looking for life on Mars in our exploration of the solar system, we do not want to find life that we have unintentionally taken there.

Mars InSight, as with most landers, is a bundle of as many science experiments that can be folded into the smallest space possible for the long trip. Out There! A veritable contortionist of engineering splendor.

InSight is another NASA acronym, Wikipedia calls it a “backronym,” (an acronym that’s been reverse-engineered from a word) that signifies Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. Basically they want to study what is below the surface of Mars.

So far, all of our exploration has been on the surface and in the atmosphere. We know very little about the interior. And how can you know a planet well if you know nothing of what is inside.

Oh, and it will give us insight about the formation of other rocky planets in our solar system, Earth, Venus and Mercury.

InSight will mainly study Mars quakes with a very sensitive seismometer, and interior temperature with a self digging “mole” designed to burrow 15 feet or so into the ground. It is a mini pile-driver, tick ticking its way into the ground followed by its power cord and sensor cables.

As we suit up into our “clean” bunny suits, media wearing dark blue compared to the crew wearing very light blue, we must follow their PP protocols closely. With all but our eyes showing it can be difficult to identify folks at a distance and they want to keep track of us. In the meantime they have been cleaning and bagging our camera equipment for entry.

We straddle a bench, don booties and place them across the bench onto the clean sticky side, particles being removed at every stage. Cleaner step by step, we finally enter the “air shower” rotating with arms above head as offensive spores are blown off and sucked out of the shower. The shower stops, the door clicks, and opens and we enter the “clean room” and InSight sits there, quietly, diminutive, amassing only 1,304 pounds.

The JPL representative is talking and telling us who is who and how we should be careful and who we can talk to. I just need a minute to take it all in.

This feat of creativity and engineering beauty is going to Mars!

After a minute or so I am able to reorient and take in the vast expanse of the Astrotech PPF (payload processing facility). There are any number of warning signs: “WARNING, ORDNANCE INSTALLED,” “WARNING HYDRAZINE HAS BEEN LOADED INTO VEHICLE, SPACECRAFT IS FUELED.” “Charged heat pipes contain Anhydrous Ammonia. ALL PERSONNEL MUST EVACUATE THE AREA IF THEY SMELL AMMONIA,” oh, and “CALL 911”!

This room is huge. And InSight looks tiny sitting upside down, its belly exposed to the ceiling, little pie plate landing pads and legs all tucked in. It is just awaiting the placement of the ablative heat shield that protects it from the 2,500 degree entry. They will move the 40 foot tall fairings that protect the craft during launch and enclose the spacecraft before they move it out to the launch pad for placement on the Atlas V rocket. The high ceiling makes sense.

After six months of travel, EDL (entry, descent, landing) begins with the spacecraft traveling 14,100 MPH. The heat shield allows the craft to slow using aero-braking even though there is little “aero” on Mars. Then a supersonic parachute opens, slows the craft more and finally after dropping its heat shield and back shell Insight drifts down until it is dropped. At this point landing

thrusters take over the descent and land the craft at a gentle 5.4 mph. All of this being run by autonomous onboard computers. With a delay of several minutes to communicate with Mission Control there is nothing they could do anyway – it has already happened. When they get the first indication of a successful landing, they are cheering an event that took place too many minutes ago.

At this point, the craft has turned its long axis to face East and West on Mars to keep two solar arrays’ shadow out of the work area, and maximize the robot arm’s work space. For InSight’s only power during its one SOL (a Martian year, about two Earth years) mission is from the Sun.

Like Curiosity, the last lander, a rover, InSight does everything very slowly. It is move, check, move, take a picture, check, move. Unloading the science experiments is planned to take two weeks and all they are doing is unloading a seismometer and burrowing 15 feet into the ground to measure Mars’ interior. But it must be understood that at this distance and cost it makes sense to take it slow. Slow is good.

If past missions are a good indicator, this probe will last much much longer than its design life of two years. Opportunity is still gathering data after 14 years (design estimate three months). Curiosity, the 2012 rover, is still roving after six years – three times its design life. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Boeing and Lockheed Martin Space’s work has proven reliable.

We have used up our alotted time with the lander, Astrotech and NASA folks are encouraging us to finish up. The next group is prepping. As we reverse the gowning process we realize how hot and moist it was getting inside our suits. And these professionals work all day this way. It is nice to be out in the open air.

InSight will begin its 301 million mile journey this Saturday, May 5, at SLC 3, Vandenberg AFB near Lompoc, California on a ULA Atlas V.

Go Atlas, Go Centaur, Go InSight!</s>‘Mars, here I come!’ NASA’s InSight launches from California on a six-month journey

NASA’s newest mission InSight, developed to probe deep beneath the surface of Mars, began its 300-million mile journey from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The pre-dawn launch was a rare spectacle for West Coast residents.

The post ‘Mars, here I come!’ NASA’s InSight launches from California on a six-month journey appeared first on Digital Trends.

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This post was syndicated from Digital Trends. Click here to read the full text on the original website.</s>CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A robotic geologist armed with a hammer and quake monitor rocketed toward Mars on Saturday, May 5, aiming to land on the red planet and explore its mysterious insides.

In a twist, NASA launched the Mars InSight lander from California rather than Florida’s Cape Canaveral. It was the first interplanetary mission ever to depart from the West Coast, drawing pre-dawn crowds to fog-socked Vandenberg Air Force Base and rocket watchers down the California coast into Baja.

“This is a big day. We’re going back to Mars!” said NASA’s new boss, Jim Bridenstine. “This is an extraordinary mission with a whole host of firsts.”

The spacecraft will take more than six months to get to Mars and start its unprecedented geologic excavations, traveling 300 million miles (485 million kilometers) to get there.

JPL is managing the InSight project for NASA’s Discovery Program. The spacecraft, including cruise stage and lander, was built and tested by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver.

InSight will dig deeper into Mars than ever before — nearly 16 feet, or 5 meters — to take the planet’s temperature. It will also attempt to make the first measurements of marsquakes, using a high-tech seismometer placed directly on the Martian surface.

The Atlas V rocket also gave a lift to a pair of mini test satellites, or CubeSats, meant to trail InSight all the way to Mars and then serve as a potential communication link. They popped off the rocket’s upper stage in hot pursuit of InSight, as elated launch controllers applauded and shook hands following the morning’s success.

The $1 billion mission involves scientists from the U.S., France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

NASA hasn’t put a spacecraft down on Mars since the Curiosity rover in 2012. The U.S., in fact, is the only country to successfully land and operate a spacecraft at Mars. It’s tough, complicated stuff. Only about 40 percent of all missions to Mars from all countries — orbiters and landers alike — have proven successful over the decades.

If all goes well, the three-legged InSight will descend by parachute and engine firings onto a flat equatorial region of Mars — believed to be free of big, potentially dangerous rocks — on Nov. 26. Once down, it will stay put, using a mechanical arm to place the science instruments on the surface.

“This mission will probe the interior of another terrestrial planet, giving us an idea of the size of the core, the mantle, the crust and our ability then to compare that with the Earth,” said NASA’s chief scientist Jim Green. “This is of fundamental importance to understand the origin of our solar system and how it became the way it is today.”

InSight’s principal scientist, Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said Mars is ideal for learning how the rocky planets of our solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. Unlike our active Earth, Mars hasn’t been transformed by plate tectonics and other processes, he noted.

Over the course of two Earth years — or one Martian year — scientists expect InSight’s three main experiments to provide a true 3-D image of the interior of Mars.

The lander is equipped with a seismometer for measuring marsquakes, a self-hammering probe for burrowing beneath the surface, and a radio system for tracking the spacecraft’s position and planet’s wobbly rotation, thereby revealing the size and composition of Mars’ core.

“InSight, for seismologists, will really be a piece of history, a new page of history,” said the Paris Institute of Earth Physics’ Philippe Lognonne, lead scientist of the InSight seismometer.

Problems with the French-supplied seismometer kept InSight from launching two years ago. California was always part of the plan.

NASA normally launches from Cape Canaveral, but decided to switch to California for InSight to take advantage of a shorter flight backlog. This was the first U.S. interplanetary mission to launch from somewhere other than Cape Canaveral.

It was so foggy at Vandenberg that spectators there could hear and feel the roar and rumble of the rocket, but couldn’t see it. It was a marvelous sight, though, farther south. The rocket’s bright orange flame was visible for some time as it arced upward across the dark sky west of greater Los Angeles.

Not even two weeks on the job, NASA’s new administrator, Bridenstine, observed the launch on monitors at space agency headquarters in Washington.

“I can’t think of a better way to start my day!” Bridenstine tweeted.

Associated Press writer John Antczak in Pasadena, California, contributed to this report.

Historically, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, based in La Canada Flintridge, has launched its robotic missions to Mars out of Cape Canaveral.

A pair of briefcase-size satellites will launch aboard InSight, break free after liftoff, then follow the spacecraft for six months all the way to Mars. They won’t stop at Mars, just fly past.

PHOTOS: All systems go for InSight’s historic launch.

The launch didn’t cause the spectacular light show that set off awe (and some panic) during some previous Vandenberg launches, but early risers took to social media to share their glimpses.

In the predawn darkness, most viewers simply saw a tiny red or white dot inching along the horizon.

InSight is expected to land on Mars on Nov. 26. The $1 billion U.S.-European mission is dedicated to studying the innards of Mars, with a robotic geologist digging 15 feet into the Martian soil.

InSight’s goal: To capture the most precise measurements of images of the red planet ever. By measuring the planet’s seismic activity, JPL aims to document Mars’ interior structure and paint a sophisticate picture of the planet’s surface and infrastructure.

The part of the mission that delights Sci-Fi fans and space enthusiasts: Scientists hope the seismic waves could reveal underground pockets of water — and perhaps even locate sites where life of some sort could be possible.</s>Vandenberg Air Force Base (US): NASA today blasted off its latest Mars lander, InSight, designed to perch on the surface and listen for “Marsquakes” ahead of eventual human missions to explore the Red Planet.

“Three, two, one, liftoff!” said a NASA commentator as the spacecraft launched on a dark, foggy morning atop an Atlas V rocket at 4:05 AM Pacific time (1635 IST) from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, marking NASA’s first interplanetary launch from the US west coast.

The USD 993 million project aims to expand human knowledge of interior conditions on Mars, inform efforts to send human explorers there, and reveal how rocky planets like the Earth formed billions of years ago.

If all goes as planned, the lander should settle on the Red Planet on November 26.

Its name, InSight, is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.

NASA chief scientist Jim Green said experts already know that Mars has quakes, avalanches and meteor strikes.

“But how quake-prone is Mars? That is fundamental information that we need to know as humans that explore Mars,” Green said.

The key instrument on board is a seismometer, called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, made by the French Space Agency.

After the lander settles on the Martian surface, a robotic arm is supposed to emerge and place the seismometer directly on the ground.

The second main instrument is a self-hammering probe that will monitor the flow of heat in the planet’s subsurface.

Called the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, it was made by the German Space Agency with the participation of the Polish Space Agency.

The probe will bore down 10 to 16 feet (three to five meters) below the surface, NASA said, 15 times deeper than any previous Mars mission.

Understanding the temperature on Mars is crucial to NASA’s efforts to send people there by the 2030’s, and how much a human habitat might need to be heated under frigid conditions, said Green.

Daytime summer temperatures near the Martian equator may reach 70 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees C), but then plunge by night to -100 F (-73 C).

“It is an important part of knowledge of how this planet is evolving,” Green said.

“We have to be able as humans living and working on Mars to survive that.”

The solar and battery-powered lander is designed to operate for 26 Earth months, or one year on Mars, a period in which it is expected to pick up as many as 100 quakes.

“Hopefully it will last a lot longer than that,” said Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The spacecraft was initially supposed to launch in 2016 but had to be delayed after temperature tests showed a problem with part of the seismometer, which engineers have since fixed.

InSight aims to be the first NASA spacecraft to land on Mars since the Curiosity rover in 2012.

“There is nothing routine about going to Mars, especially landing on Mars,” said Stu Spath, InSight program manager at Lockheed Martin Space. (PTI)</s>NASA has set the Mars Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) on a 480 million km trip to the red planet. The lander/probe was launched atop an Atlas V rocket from NASA's Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

In spite of the day being foggy and visibility from the surface quite low, the space agency was able to carry out a successful liftoff. The probe is expected to reach Mars by November, notes a release by NASA.

The rocket was made up of the payload– InSight– on top seated on the Centaur second stage which was taken into orbit by Atlas V in less than 14 minutes, notes the report after which Centaur ignited for the first time. About 79 minutes later, Centaur reportedly ignited a second time, setting up the probe's Mars trajectory. Just 93 minutes after launch, Centaur also separated from InSight, which was sent on its epic journey towards Mars. The lander will take six and a half months to reach the red planet.

"The United States continues to lead the way to Mars with this next exciting mission to study the Red Planet's core and geological processes," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "I want to congratulate all the teams from NASA and our international partners who made this accomplishment possible. As we continue to gain momentum in our work to send astronauts back to the Moon and on to Mars, missions like InSight are going to prove invaluable."

Over the next six months, the spacecraft will be constantly monitored by NASA, making sure its solar arrays are in place, the ship stays on course and even make a few corrections to keep it on target till InSight lands on Mars on November 26. Once there, it is set to carry out its science missions till November 2020, says NASA.

"InSight will not only teach us about Mars, it will enhance our understanding of formation of other rocky worlds like Earth and the Moon, and thousands of planets around other stars," said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. "InSight connects science and technology with a diverse team of JPL-led international and commercial partners."</s>NASA is set to launch InSight, a new robotic lander mission, to learn more about the interior of the red planet, and the launch will be one true spectacle for space enthusiasts across the globe.

The lander will be taking off on a United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V-401 rocket from Space Launch Complex-3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. And, according to a statement from NASA, the two-hour window for the launch opens in the pre-dawn hours of May 5, just around 4:05 a.m. PDT or 7:05 a.m. EDT.

While the lander will begin a six and a half month-long journey – around 485 million kilometers – to the red planet with this launch, it is worth noting this interplanetary mission, officially dubbed "Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport," will be the first one from the United States West Coast.

Before this, all such NASA missions launched from Florida and flew over the Atlantic to get an advantage of additional speed from our planet’s rotation. However, in this case, the payload is light and the rocket is powerful enough to fly southward over Pacific and take the whole thing into orbit 13 minutes after lift-off.

"For those Southern Californians who are interested in rockets or space exploration, or have insomnia, we hope to put on a great show this Saturday,” Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in the statement.

If all goes according to the agency’s plan, InSight and its two tiny communication cubsats "Wall-E" and "Eva," will reach Martian neighborhood in November.

That said, viewers should also note bad weather conditions, particularly fog, might create a little trouble for the space agency and affect a clear view of ATLAS V launch vehicle.

"We are anticipating this fog to be very shallow, about 200-600 feet above the pad," Kristina Williams from Air Force's 30th Space Wing, which manages launches from the Californian base, said during a pre-launch briefing.

As the Verge reports, the Space Wing says the rocket might pull-off the launch and soar through the fog, but in that situation, viewers might not be able to get a clear view unless they are standing far away from the base (check the sites to see the launch here). However, if the sky is clear, the launch could be seen from Santa Maria to San Diego.

There’s also a simpler, cozier way to see the launch of InSight – Livestream. NASA TV has been streaming the agency’s highly anticipated launches live and this one will also be no exception. The coverage is set to start at 6:30 a.m. ET and you can find the live feed from the channel below. If the launch gets delayed due to bad weather or any other situation at the last minute, the next backup date is Sunday. NASA has multiple opportunities to put InSight into the Martian orbit between May 5 and June 8.

“I’ve been to several rocket launches, but it is a whole different vibe when there is something you've been working on for years sitting in the nose cone waiting to get hurled beyond our atmosphere,” Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at JPL, said. “But as exciting as launch day will be, it’s just a first step in a journey that should tell us not only why Mars formed the way it did, but how planets take shape in general."</s>An Atlas 5 rocket is poised for launch from California Saturday to send a robotic lander to Mars, the centerpiece of a $1 billion mission to map the hidden interior of the red planet by recording the faint vibrations of remote marsquakes and hammering a probe into the crust to take the temperature of its core.

In a third investigation, scientists will measure tiny changes in the InSight lander's radio signals as the planet rotates to tease out the orientation of its polar axis as it slowly wobbles, or precesses, due to the core "sloshing around" in the deep interior. From that, they hope to determine the core's size, density and composition.

"The 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're going to do that by going to Mars," said Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator of the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- InSight -- mission.

"How we get from a ball of featureless rock into a planet that may or may not support life is a key question," he said. "And these processes that do this all happen in the first few tens of millions of years. We'd like to be able to understand what happened, and the clues to that are in the structure of the planet that gets set up in these early years."
• None Did life ever exist on Mars? It could have 



But Earth is very active, and much of the early geologic record has been destroyed by continental drift and the churning of the mantle. As a result, "we're kind of at a loss to see, on the Earth, what's the evidence for what happened in those early years," Banerdt said.

"But we can go to Mars. Mars is a smaller planet, it is less active than the earth, and so it has retained the fingerprints of those early processes in its basic structure -- the thickness of the crust, the composition of the mantle, the size and composition of its core.

"And by 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 where we can actually live and play and have a good time."

Since 1964, the United States has launched 22 robotic spacecraft to Mars at a cost of more than $20 billion in an evolving campaign to map out the red planet's surface, determine the role of water in its history and to search for signs of past habitability and the organic building blocks of life.

InSight, built by Lockheed Martin and based on the design of NASA's successful Phoenix lander, is the first mission dedicated solely to the interior of Mars. It is expected to operate for at least two years, or one 687-day martian year.

It all begins with launch from pad 3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles at 4:05 a.m. PDT (GMT-7; 7:05 a.m. EDT) Saturday, two years late because of a problem with the seismometer instrument that forced NASA to pass up the previous Mars launch window.

Forecasters predicted an 80 percent chance of heavy fog Saturday and Sunday, but mission managers had the option of waiving a visibility constraint if all other systems are "go."

All previous interplanetary missions launched from the United States took off from Florida, taking advantage of Earth's eastward rotation to gain additional velocity. InSight is the first to be launched from the West Coast, where rockets fly away to the south into polar orbits and cannot take advantage of the planet's rotation.

The move was prompted by a busy Cape Canaveral launch schedule and the Atlas 5's ability to make up for the lost velocity.

As a result, early risers in southern California and western Mexico, weather permitting, will have a chance to watch InSight's fiery departure as it takes off from Vandenberg on a southerly trajectory over the Pacific Ocean.

If all goes well, the Atlas 5's Centaur second stage will propel the spacecraft out of an initial parking orbit and onto a 171-day trajectory to Mars. Regardless of when it takes off during the 2018 Mars launch window, InSight will reach the red planet on Nov. 26, setting up what has come to be known as "seven minutes of terror."

That's how long it will take InSight to reach the surface of Mars after slamming into the thin martian atmosphere at a blistering 13,200 mph.

"That's when the project manager, and maybe the principal investigator, are completely terrorized by all the possible things Mars could throw at us," said Tom Hoffman, the InSight project manager.

"Hopefully, we won't get any surprises on our landing day, but you never know. We've done a lot of testing, a lot of analysis to make sure we've done everything we possibly can to land safely, and I believe we're going to do that."

After separating from its interplanetary cruise stage, InSight, nestled inside a flying saucer-shaped "aeroshell" and protected by a state-of-the-art heat shield, will plunge into the martian atmosphere at an altitude of about 80 miles.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will be flying overhead at the time, recording telemetry from InSight for later relay to Earth. In addition, two small "cubesat" spacecraft launched along with InSight, the first such micro spacecraft to make an interplanetary voyage, will attempt to relay data back to Earth in realtime as they race past the planet in a technology demonstration.

InSight will endure deceleration forces up to 7.4 times Earth's gravity and heat shield temperatures up to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. Just under four minutes after entry, at an altitude of 7.5 miles and a velocity of some 928 mph, InSight's large parachute will unfurl to rapidly slow the descent.

Fifteen seconds later, now descending at 295 mph, the no-longer-needed heat shield will be jettisoned, exposing the bottom of the lander to view, and 10 seconds after that, three landing legs will deploy and lock in place.

The lander's radar will be activated to help the flight computer determine the spacecraft's altitude and rate of descent and finally, less than a mile above the surface and descending at about 136 mph, InSight will be released from the aeroshell to fall on its own.

Moments later, 12 small rocket motors will fire up, horizontal velocity will be nulled out, the lander will orient itself so its solar arrays will receive maximum sunlight on the surface and it will descend to a five-mile-per-hour touchdown in the Elysium Planitia area 4.5 degrees north of the martian equator at around 2 p.m. local time.

Fifteen minutes after touchdown, InSight's two circular solar arrays should unfurl to begin battery charging.

InSight is equipped with two primary instruments: the Seismic Experiment Interior Structure -- SEIS -- seismometer, provided by the French space agency, CNES, and the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe -- HP3 -- provided by the German Aerospace Agency, DLR. The two instruments cost the European space agencies about $180 million.

To collect the desired science, both instruments must be lifted from InSight's upper deck and placed on the ground near the lander using a multi-joint 7.8-foot-long robot arm. Before that happens, cameras will carefully photograph the surrounding terrain to identify the smoothest, rock-free areas.

Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory then will use an engineering mockup of the lander to repeatedly practice picking up the instruments and lowering them in place. Finally, the seismometer will be placed on the martian soil, a protective weather shield will be lowered on top of it and the heat probe will be set on the surface nearby.

Trailing data cables will link the instruments to InSight's computer and communications systems. The entire process is expected to take about 10 weeks to complete.

The seismometer "is really the heart of the InSight mission," Banerdt said. "The seismometer is what allows us to see deep into the planet, to have insight into the planet, and it uses the seismic waves that are generated by marsquakes."

Housed in a vacuum bottle, the instrument is capable of measuring movements "on the scale of an atom," he said. "The resolution limit of our seismometer, sitting in the dirt on Mars, in the weather, is about one half the radius of a hydrogen atom. So it's a very, very exquisitely precise measurement."

As seismic waves from marsquakes travel through the martian interior, they will pass through different types of rock and soil that will alter their shape.

"Scientists understand how to take the shapes of those wiggles, their frequency, their amplitude, the polarization, the timing, all kinds of properties of those waves and pull that information out and finally, after we've gotten many, many marsquakes from different directions, we can put together a three-dimensional view of the inside of Mars," Banerdt said.

The heat probe will use a spring-driven internal hammer-like device to pound its way down into the martian soil trailing a cable studded with sensitive temperature sensors. After some 10,000 hammer blows, the probe should reach a maximum depth of about 15 feet, pausing along the way to measure the thermal conductivity of the soil at different depths.

Once at its maximum depth, the sensors will measure the slight differences in temperature between the surface and the end of the cable, allowing scientists to extrapolate temperatures all the way to the core 2,000 miles below.

"And that amount of heat is tied to the geological activity of the planet," Banerdt said. "It's the heat engine of the planet that drives vulcanism, 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."

InSight's third investigation does not require a separate instrument. By carefully analyzing slight changes in the radio signals from the lander as Mars rotates on its axis, scientists can determine the spacecraft's position to within a few inches, precisely locate the martian polar axis and measure how it slowly changes orientation like the motion of a spinning top.

"Over the course of a year, we can watch that north pole wobble just a little bit because of the core sloshing around inside the planet, and that will give us a very, very tight constraint on the size of that core, its density and so its composition," Banerdt said.

"That tells us the structure of Mars, the structure of Mars tells us something about the processes that put that structure together, we can put that into our models, extrapolate to the Earth and understand how the Earth formed four and a half billion years ago. And that's really the crux of the science behind this mission."
NASA's InSight Mars lander launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, California. It is the first interplanetary mission launched from the West Coast of the United States.