Landing on Mars with a spacecraft that’s not much bigger than a couple of office desks is “a hugely difficult task, and every time we do it, we’re on pins and needles,” Banerdt said.
It will take seven minutes for the spacecraft’s entry, descent and landing.
“Hopefully, we won’t get any surprises on our landing day. But you never know,” said NASA project manager Tom Hoffman.
Once on the surface, InSight will take interplanetary excavation to a “whole new level,” according to NASA’s science mission director Thomas Zurbuchen.
A slender cylindrical probe dubbed the mole is designed to tunnel nearly 16 feet into the Martian soil. A quake-measuring seismometer, meanwhile, will be removed from the lander by a mechanical arm and placed directly on the surface for better vibration monitoring.
Two years late
InSight is actually two years late flying because of problems with the French-supplied seismometer system that had to be fixed.
The 1,530-pound (694-kilogram) InSight builds on the design of the Phoenix lander and, before that, the Viking landers. They’re all stationary three-legged landers; no roaming around. InSight stands for “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.” InSight’s science objectives, however, are reminiscent of NASA’s Apollo program.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Apollo moonwalkers drilled up to 8 feet (2.5 metres) into the lunar surface so scientists back home could measure the underground flow of lunar heat. The moon still holds seismometers left behind by the 12 moonmen.
Previous Mars missions have focused on surface or close-to-the-surface rocks and mineral. Phoenix, for instance, dug just several inches down for samples. The Martian atmosphere and magnetic field also have been examined in detail over the decades.
“But we have never probed sort of beneath the outermost skin of the planet,” said Banerdt.
The landing site, Elysium Planitia, is a flat equatorial region with few big rocks that could damage the spacecraft on touchdown or block the mechanical mole’s drilling. Banerdt jokingly calls it “the biggest parking lot on Mars.” Scientists are shooting for two years of work — that’s two years by Earth standards, or the equivalent of one full Martian year.
“Mars is still a pretty mysterious planet,” Banerdt said. “Even with all the studying that we’ve done, it could throw us a curveball.”