NASA Launches a New Mission To Mars (cnn.com)

"This is a big day. We're going back to Mars," said one NASA official, presiding over this morning's launch of the first Mars surface craft to lift off since 2011. CNN reports: The Atlas V 401 rocket also carried two suitcase-size spacecraft, designed to orbit Mars, as it blasted into the dark and cloudy sky, which turned bright gold for seconds as the rocket ascended in a plume of smoke... After a six-month journey, if it all goes as planned, InSight -- whose name is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- will touch down just north of the Martian equator on November 26, joining five other NASA spacecraft operating on and above Mars.

The 790-pound (358-kilogram) probe will then begin its two-year science mission to seek the "fingerprints" of the processes that formed the rocky planets of the solar system. It will measure the planet's "vital signs: 'its "pulse' (seismology), 'temperature' (heat flow) and 'reflexes' (precision tracking)," according to NASA. The explorer doesn't have wheels, so it can't roll around gathering up dirt to study. But it does have a 7.8-foot-long (2.4-meter) robotic arm. The arm will place a seismometer on the ground to detect "marsquakes" (think earthquakes, but on Mars, of course). InSight also will burrow 10 to 16 feet into the crust of Mars, going 15 times deeper than any previous Martian mission, according to NASA.
The rocket is carrying two briefcase-sized satellites (named Wall-E and Eva) which will demonstrate that cubesats can survey journeys to other planets.

Two microchips have also been affixed to the lander carrying the names of 2.4 million space enthusiasts -- including William Shatner.

Comments

Re:"We're going back to Mars"?

[religionofpeas]

A grossly disproportionate amount of their planetary science budget goes to this one destination

It's the only planet where you can actually do some exploration on the ground, plus it's reasonably close to us, and fairly interesting. Makes total sense to spend a major part of the resources on it.

Re:"We're going back to Mars"?

[Rei]

The Soviets had more success doing on-ground exploration on Venus than on Mars. You can also explore on-ground on Mercury... all terrestrial planets, really. And planetary moons. Not that the ground is the only interesting part of a planet. Mars is also slightly further (transit times, dV) than Venus.

The US has neglected Venus to an obscene extent. While Mars gets about one mission every two years (sometimes multi-part missions), the last dedicated NASA mission to Venus was launched in 1989 - nearly three decades ago. NASA's scientists keep proposing interesting missions to Venus, but they keep getting rejected by management in favour of the more-popular-thanks-to-sci-fi destination of Mars.

And the return on science investment is so much less on Mars. We've studied Mars so much, while some really bloody basic things remain entirely unanswered on Venus. The longest river in the solar system is on Venus. What carved it? We have no bloody clue. Why does Venus absorb so much UV? Who knows? What happened to all of the mercury in Venus's crust - after all, it should have baked out into the atmosphere, yet isn't there? One guess is as good as another. Does it rain, snow, or frost in Venus's clouds, and if so, of what materials and where? Not a bloody clue. What are the (apparently multiple types of) metallic / semiconductive frosts in Venus's highlands? Beats us. We can't even image them well - in our best-resolution parts of Venus's surface, a football pitch would take up two pixels. Are Venus's terrae remnant granitic crust or not (and thus, if so, since Venus had oceans before Earth did and they likely lasted for at least a billion years, are their fossils? Maybe, maybe not. Why doesn't VVvenus have an intrinsic magnetic field (the slow rotation rate, according to dynamo theory, doesn't explain it)? We can only guess at its internal structure to hypothesize as to why. Why the bloody heck is Venus so different from Earth, and is it Earth's fate? Lots of competing theories based on various parameters, not nearly enough evidence to back them up. And it's pretty bloody important to know whether terrestrial planets teeter on a knife's edge between habitable and hell or not.

Re:"We're going back to Mars"?

[Rei]

Oh, and to elaborate on why the Soviets had better luck with Venus than Mars... people focus (of course) on the heat and pressure due to the dense atmosphere. And it's of course a real issue, although one that even Soviet tech developed in the 1960s could deal with. But this neglects to mention the aspects of Venus that make it easier than Earth. Its similarity to Earth first off makes testing many aspects of a mission simpler. But beyond that, the thick atmosphere is a big fluffy cushion. One of the Soviet craft actually had its parachute unexpectedly break off, putting it into a freefall, and it still survived and transmitted information from the surface, because its terminal velocity was so low. Many Mars missions have been "eaten by the ghoul" due to landing / deployment issues that just don't apply to Venus. It's been calculated that with the right trajectory, you could fire a simple hollow titanium sphere from Earth, with no other hardware onboard - no entry aeroshell, no drogue chute, no main chute, no landing retrothrusters, nothing - and have it land perfectly intact on the surface.

So yes, there are some disadvantages, but there also are advantages.

Of course, on Venus, landing is overrated. It's easy to loft very heavy probes in Venus's atmosphere (unlike Mars), and since it superrotates, Venus takes your probe across the whole world, gathering data all the way.

Re:Waste of money

[MightyMartian]

The claim was that we need to find water on Mars to make it viable. The reality is that Mars has a lot of war, and a lot of it is fairly close to the surface, so it would be no more "mining" than a backhoe digging a trench. Pick your landing site correctly, and the water problem is solved. Frankly, water is the least of the problems for a manned mission to Mars. Getting there and back, surviving in a hostile environment with sufficient radiation shielding, maintaining a viable settlement for whatever the term of the mission (which surely is going to be at least four years round trip), that's the challenge. But water, if the right site is selected, that problem is pretty much solved.