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

"We're going back to Mars"?

[Rei]

"Back to Mars"? NASA is obsessed with Mars, in a way no other space agency is. A grossly disproportionate amount of their planetary science budget goes to this one destination. Why act like they've been neglecting Mars?

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:"We're going back to Mars"?

[Zumbs]

I am also a lot more curious about Venus than I am about Mars. And it is not just the US that focuses on Mars. All the extra terrestrial activities of our space agencies either focus on the Moon (makes sense given its proximity), Mars or both.

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

[c6gunner]

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.

Their longest-surviving probe lasted about 2 hours, which is a pretty funny definition of "deal with". Sure, maybe we could stretch that to 4 hours or, if we are really really clever, even a whole day, but you're never going to get a Venus Rover booting around the planet for years at a time like we can on Mars.

Personally I think Mercury would be a much more worthwhile target. While it's closer to the sun it's actually not as hot as Venus, meaning probes could last longer. More importantly, the poles seem to have ice, meaning water should be easily available for possible manned missions, and it's proximity to the sun means that solar panels would be far more effective than on earth, and orders of magnitude more effective than on Mars.

Also we've NEVER landed a probe on Mercury, so if you take want to break new grounds it's definitely a better destination than Venus.

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

[Rei]

Most of the mission proposals for Venus have been much cheaper than those for Mars. It's Mars that they're spending many hundreds of millions to the lower billion dollars on these flagships, not Venus. As mentioned, Venus was first explored using 1960s Soviet technology. It does not require some sort of a breakthrough. There are of course new technologies that can yield new options for exploring Venus - high temperature processors for non-cooled probes, high temperature radiators for RTG probes, surface wind and solar (yes, solar actually works on the surface, for low power probes), inflatable bellows for the ability to fly up and down at will (including e.g. only short stays on the surface, then climbing to go to a new location and cool), and a whole range of others. But we can get massive science returns from little budget on Venus even as things stand.

Concerning floating long-term habitats on Venus: Link

Concerning testing technologies: your mention of "volcanoes" refers only to the surface, not most of the challenges in entry, descent, etc, and only applies to surface probes, and even in that case, only to the portions exposed to the heat and pressure. And that's not how they test probes for the surface, they use what's basically a big autoclave. But you cannot just test a Mars probe in the Atacama. That's a vastly different environment from Mars (orders of magnitude different pressure, major differences in gravity, radiation, etc), and does not remotely test the vehicle. You don't have to take my word on the testing differences, read some of the old interviews from the Soviet scientists who worked on their various programmes. Testing for Venus probes was found to be a lot simpler in most regards.

And, don't discount the science that will come from Mars once real people and geologists and chemists can get there with a rock hammer, a microscope, and a sense of adventure.

You may be surprised to learn that it's actually not that unrealistic - with modern technology, nothing far future - to have humans walking around on the surface of Venus. As usual, see the above link. More to the point, they could even fly in the process.

We do have the budget for both Venus and Mars. Mars is used like a dumping ground for money; there is no reason whatsoever why Mars probes have to (in some of the cases) be multi-billion-dollar craft. The budget requests for Venus probes are tiny by comparison.