[meteorite-list] Single Site on Mars Advanced for 2016 NASA Lander (InSight)

From: Ron Baalke <baalke_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2015 17:48:20 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID: <201503050148.t251mKwY025234_at_zagami.jpl.nasa.gov>

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4501

Single Site on Mars Advanced for 2016 NASA Lander
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
March 4, 2015

THINGS TO KNOW:

o Launch period -- the first Mars launch from California -- opens
  March 4, 2016

o The mission will examine Mars' interior to learn how Earth-like
  planets form and evolve

o Landing-site evaluation has narrowed to one site in Mars' Elysium Planitia

NASA's next mission to Mars, scheduled to launch one year from today to
examine the Red Planet's deep interior and investigate how rocky planets
like Earth evolved, now has one specific site under evaluation as the
best place to land and deploy its science instruments.

The mission called InSight -- an acronym for "Interior Exploration using
Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport" -- is scheduled to
launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The launch period runs
from March 4 to March 30, 2016, and will mark the first California launch
of an interplanetary mission. Installation of science-instrument hardware
onto the spacecraft has begun and a key review has given thumbs up to
integration and testing of the mission's component systems from several
nations participating in the international project.

The landing-site selection process evaluated four candidate locations
selected in 2014. The quartet is within the flat-lying "Elysium Planitia,"
less than five degrees north of the equator, and all four appear safe
for InSight's landing. The single site will continue to be analyzed in
coming months for final selection later this year. If unexpected problems
with this site are found, one of the others would be imaged and could
be selected. The favored site is centered at about four degrees north
latitude and 136 degrees east longitude.

"This is wondrous terrain, exactly what we want to land on because it
is smooth, flat, with very few rocks in the highest-resolution images,"
said InSight's site-selection leader, Matt Golombek of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Mars orbiters have provided detailed information about the candidate sites,
which are mapped as landing ellipses about 81 miles (130 kilometers) west-to-east
by about 17 miles (27 kilometers) north-to-south. An ellipse covers the
area within which InSight has odds of about 99 percent of landing, if
targeted for the ellipse center. Several types of terrain, such as "cratered,"
"etched" and "smooth" were mapped in each ellipse. The one chosen for
final evaluations has highest proportion in the smooth category.

After InSight reaches Mars on Sept. 28, 2016, the mission will assess
properties of the planet's crust, mantle and core. The interior of Mars
has not been churned as much as Earth's because Mars lacks the tectonic
activity that recycles Earth's crustal plates back into the mantle. Thus,
Mars offers an opportunity to find clues no longer present on Earth about
how rocky planets such as Earth, Mars, Venus and Mercury formed and evolved.

InSight's primary science will study the planet's interior, not surface
features. Besides safety for the landing, the main site-selection criterion
is for the ground within reach of the lander's robotic arm to be penetrable
for a heat-flow probe designed to hammer itself into the soil to a depth
three to five yards, or meters.

Evidence that the ground will be suitable for the probe, rather than rock
solid, comes from assessment by the Thermal Imaging System on NASA's Mars
Odyssey orbiter of how quickly the ground cools at night or warms in sunlight,
and evaluation of images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment
on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

The heat-flow probe is a key part of InSight's Heat Flow and Physical
Properties Package (HP3) provided by the German Aerospace Center (DLR).
Electronics for that instrument were the first hardware from the science
payload put onto the InSight spacecraft being assembled and tested at
Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver.

"As flight components such as the HP3 electronics become available, our
team continues to integrate them on the spacecraft and test their functionality,"
said Stu Spath, InSight spacecraft program manager at Lockheed Martin.
"We're steadily marching toward the start of spacecraft environmental
testing this spring."

InSight's robotic arm will also place another science instrument onto
the ground. This is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, or
SEIS, from the French Space Agency (CNES), with components from Germany,
Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

A third experiment will use the radio link between InSight and NASA's
Deep Space Network antennas on Earth to measure precisely a wobble in
Mars' rotation that could reveal whether the planet has a molten or solid
core. Wind and temperature sensors from Spain's Center for Astrobiology
and a pressure sensor will monitor weather, and a magnetometer will measure
magnetic disturbances.

The project passed its System Integration Review in February. "A panel
of experts from outside the project reviewed the system-level integration
and test program," said InSight Project Manager Tom Hoffman, of JPL. "For
Insight, there are multiple systems being brought together from several
countries for final integration and testing in Denver."

InSight and other NASA current and future projects will help inform the
journey to Mars, an agency priority to send humans to the Red Planet in
the 2030s.

JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall
Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

For more information about InSight, visit:

http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov

Additional information on the Discovery Program is available at:

http://discovery.nasa.gov

You can follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at:

http://www.facebook.com/NASAInSight

http://twitter.com/nasainsight


Media Contact

Guy Webster
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6278
guy.webster at jpl.nasa.gov

2015-077
Received on Wed 04 Mar 2015 08:48:20 PM PST