Mars InSight Landing Site May Look Like a Stadium Parking Lot

Washington: Elysium Planitia, the site was chosen for the November 26 landing of NASA’s InSight mission to Mars, is so plain that it may very well look like a stadium parking lot, the US space agency has said. “If Elysium Planitia were a salad, it would consist of romaine lettuce and kale - no dressing,” said InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. But that is the way the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport (InSight) project likes it. “Previous missions to the Red Planet have investigated its surface by studying its canyons, volcanoes, rocks, and soil,” said Banerdt.

“But the signatures of the planet’s formation processes can be found only by sensing and studying evidence buried far below the surface. It is InSight’s job to study the deep interior of Mars, taking the planet’s vital signs — its pulse, temperature, and reflexes,” Banerdt added. A six-sensor seismometer called the “Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure” (SEIS) will record seismic waves traveling through the interior structure of the planet. Studying seismic waves will tell scientists what might be creating the waves.

On Mars, scientists suspect that the culprits may be marsquakes or meteorites striking the surface. The mission’s “Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package” will burrow deeper than any other scoop, drill or probe on Mars before to gauge how much heat is flowing out of the planet. Its observations will shed light on whether Earth and Mars are made of the same stuff. For InSight to do its work, the team needed a landing site that checked off several boxes, because as a three-legged lander — not a rover — InSight will remain wherever it touches down. “We needed not just a safe place to land, but also a workspace that’s penetrable by our 16-feet-long (five metre) heat flow probe,” Hoffman added. (IANS)

Also Read: Mars Contains More Oxygenated Water Than Previously Thought