Just 10 days after NASA’s Curiosity rover sent back its first color photos of the Martian landscape, the US space agency said on Monday it wants in 2016 to take a better look at what’s happening beneath the Red Planet’s surface.
“Does Mars have fault lines like the Earth does? How extensive are those? What kinds of ‘Marsquakes’ are there?”
These, NASA official Lindley Johnson told reporters on a conference call, are some of the important questions the project hopes to answer.
The InSight mission, which aims to launch in March 2016, will send a device to Earth’s next-door neighbor to measure seismic activity and a subsurface heat probe to measure the flow of heat from the interior.
“Seismology is the standard method by which we’ve learned to understand the interior of the Earth,” said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. “And we have no such knowledge for Mars.”
InSight was selected from a pool of three finalists to be sponsored by the low-budget Discovery series.
The other two — one to explore a comet and another to take a closer look at Saturn moon Titan — were equally compelling, Grunsfeld said.
“All of these missions had top science,” he said, adding that the proposals also all seemed equally realistic, in terms of their ability to actually get answers.
However, InSight won out because it seemed the most likely to come in on schedule and on budget, under the US$425 million cap set for the projects. That cap does not include the cost of the launch vehicle.
Insight saved money by adopting a seismic monitor developed by the French space agency and a heat-flow probe developed by the German aerospace center.
The project also incorporated into its design “proven systems” from NASA’s highly successful Phoenix lander mission, which helped convince the selection committee it was a low-risk endeavor.
James Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, said they anticipate it will take six months for InSight to reach Mars, and then a full Martian year — about 680 Earth days — to gather the data it is looking for.
Grunsfeld added that because the device is intended to land in the relatively benign equatorial region of the planet, the device might continue to provide data beyond that first year.
Unlike an earlier NASA attempt to measure seismic activity that placed the device on the legs of the lander, leading to interference from wind, the agency said InSight plans to use a robotic arm to pull the seismometer package from the platform and place it on the ground.
The final budget for the project, the 12th to get sponsorship under Discovery, will be set after a confirmation review next year.
The Discovery series is separate from other Mars-specific programming at NASA, and the agency said this project was chosen on its own merits and with no relation to the ongoing Curiosity mission.
As for Curiosity, NASA announced on Monday that the Mars rover flexed its robotic arm for the first time since before its launch in November last year.
“We have had to sit tight for the first two weeks since landing, while other parts of the rover were checked out, so to see the arm extended ... is a huge moment for us,” NASA engineer Matt Robinson said in a statement.
Curiosity has also fired its laser to zap a martian rock called Coronation, NASA said Sunday.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing