[meteorite-list] New Insight on Mars Expected from New NASA Mission

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2012 09:40:51 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <201208211640.q7LGepNu013093_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-252

New Insight on Mars Expected from New NASA Mission
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
August 20, 2012

PASADENA, Calif. - On Aug. 20, NASA announced the selection of InSight,
a new Discovery-class mission that will probe Mars at new depths by
looking into the deep interior of Mars.

"We are certainly excited, but our veterans on this team know the
drill," said Tom Hoffman, project manager for InSight from NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Which is fortunate, because
one of the great things we'll get to do on Mars is drill below the
surface."

Drilling underneath the red Martian topsoil will be courtesy of
InSight's HP3, or Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package - one of the
four instruments the Mars lander will carry. Made by the German
Aerospace Center, or DLR, HP3 will get below Mars' skin by literally
pounding it into submission with a 14-inch (35-centimeter),
hollowed-out, electromechanically-festooned stake called the Tractor Mole.

"The Tractor Mole has an internal hammer that rises and falls, moving
the stake down in the soil and dragging a tether along behind it," said
Sue Smrekar, deputy project scientist for InSight from JPL. "We're
essentially doing the same thing any Boy or Girl Scout would do on a
campout, but we're putting our stake down on Mars."

The German-built mole will descend up to 16 feet (five meters) below the
surface, where its temperature sensors will record how much heat is
coming from Mars' interior, which reveals the planet's thermal history.

"Getting well below the surface gets us away from the sun's influence
and allows us to measure heat coming from the interior," said Smrekar.
"InSight is going take heartbeat and vital signs of the Red Planet for
an entire Martian year, two Earth years. We are really going to have an
opportunity to understand the processes that control the early planetary
formation."

InSight stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations,
Geodesy and Heat Transport. The mission is led by W. Bruce Banerdt of
JPL. InSight's science team includes U.S. and international
co-investigators from universities, industry and government agencies.
Along with DLR, the French space agency Centre National d'Etudes
Spatiales, or CNES, is also contributing an instrument to the two-year
scientific mission.

InSight builds on spacecraft technology used in NASA's highly successful
Phoenix lander mission, which was launched to the Red Planet in 2007 and
determined that water ice exists near the surface in the Martian polar
regions.

Along with providing an onboard geodetic instrument to determine the
planet's rotation axis, plus a robotic arm and two cameras used to
deploy and monitor instruments on the Martian surface, JPL performs
project management for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Discovery
Program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver will build the spacecraft. JPL
is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

A web video about the Insight mission is online at:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.cfm?id=1121. More information about
InSight is at: http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov.

As a complement to NASA's larger "flagship" planetary science
explorations, the Discovery Program goal is to achieve outstanding
results by launching many smaller missions using fewer resources and
shorter development times. The main objective is to enhance our
understanding of the solar system by exploring the planets, their moons,
and small bodies such as comets and asteroids. The program also seeks to
improve performance through the use of new technology and broaden
university and industry participation in NASA missions. More information
about the Discovery Program is at: http://discovery.nasa.gov.

DC Agle 818-393-9011
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
agle at jpl.nasa.gov

2012-252
Received on Tue 21 Aug 2012 12:40:51 PM PDT