The InSight lander will make contact on the Martian equator and dig deep down into the planet to examine its inner core

Nasa’s latest mission to another planet is set to blast off on Saturday on a seven month voyage across the frigid depths of space to Mars, with the aim of mapping the planet’s interior for the first time.

The InSight mission aims to drop a lander the size of a garden table on to Elysium Planitia, a broad, flat and largely rockless lava plain on the Martian equator, from where it will become the first robotic probe to survey the centre of the red planet.

The region, which is so featureless it would normally make scientists glaze over, was chosen by Nasa as the most suitable patch on the planet for the lander to set about revealing how Mars is arranged from surface to core.

“Where we land is an intentionally dull place,” said Neil Bowles, a planetary scientist at Oxford University, and one of a number of UK researchers involved in the mission. “It’s flat, empty and hopefully not very windy. And that is precisely what we need.”

The lander has a suite of instruments to deploy once it reaches Mars. One, a spear-like heat flow probe, will hammer itself into the soil to measure how fast heat rises from the interior of the planet. Another is a seismometer that will be placed on the surface by the lander’s robotic arm. The instrument is so sensitive that it can detect vibrations smaller than the width of an atom. Hence the need for a smooth and quiet landing spot.



Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator on the mission at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said he expects InSight to record at least a dozen, but perhaps 100, marsquakes of magnitude 3.5 or stronger over the two year mission. But scientists are hoping for more besides. From its landing spot near the equator, Insight should detect impacts from meteors that slam into Mars anywhere on its surface. Even the minuscule uplift of the ground caused by the gravitational pull of Mars’s moon, Phobos, should register on its instruments.


More equipment on the lander will be used for a radio science experiment. Two antennas on the probe enable ground controllers to track the lander’s precise position on the Martian surface. With that information, scientists can monitor how much Mars wobbles on its axis, movement that sheds light on the size of the planet’s core and whether it is liquid or solid.




Read moreBy placing an ear to the ground on Mars, mission scientists hope to record tremors, or marsquakes, for the first time. Like other planets in the solar system, Mars is still cooling down from the heat of creation more than 4bn years ago. As heat radiates away from the surface, the crust contracts and buckles. With time, stresses build up and are suddenly released when vast stretches of rock slip past one another along geological fault lines, sending tremors through the planet.



Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator on the mission at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said he expects InSight to record at least a dozen, but perhaps 100, marsquakes of magnitude 3.5 or stronger over the two year mission. But scientists are hoping for more besides. From its landing spot near the equator, Insight should detect impacts from meteors that slam into Mars anywhere on its surface. Even the minuscule uplift of the ground caused by the gravitational pull of Mars’s moon, Phobos, should register on its instrumentsMore equipment on the lander will be used for a radio science experiment. 


Two antennas on the probe enable ground controllers to track the lander’s precise position on the Martian surface. With that information, scientists can monitor how much Mars wobbles on its axis, movement that sheds light on the size of the planet’s core and whether it is liquid or solid.

With knowledge gleaned from the $814m (£600m) InSight mission - the name stands for “Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport” - scientists will gain a better understanding not only of how Mars formed, but how other rocky worlds assembled from primordial dust and debris. One mystery is why Mars, a planet less dense and half the width of Earth, did not grow any larger.

“What we hope to do is make the first map of the inside of Mars, to map out its core, crust and mantle, and for the first time really understand the structure of the interior,” said Banerdt. “We can then extrapolate that to Earth, Venus and even planets beyond the solar system.”


But before the mission can get to work, it has to get to Mars. The planet is never an easy destination and only about 40% of missions from any space agency have been successful. For the scientists and engineers on the InSight mission, the journey will begin on Saturday at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Blast-off is scheduled for 4.05am local time (12.05pm UK).

Riding on an Atlas V rocket, the InSight mission will swing around Earth before heading to Mars. Within two hours of launch, the spacecraft should make its first call home, the earliest confirmation scientists will have that the probe survived the rigours of launch. It will then be a long wait until InSight, flying with two briefcase-sized probes under test as communications links, arrives at the planet in November.

Touchdown day is when things will get tense, said Banerdt. The spacecraft will tear into the Martian sky at 13,200 miles per hour, release a parachute, and then use 12 thrusters to slow its descent. “As soon as we’re down we’ll breathe more than a sigh of relief,” he said. “Once we’re on the ground and have communications set up, I’m confident we can get a lot of great science out of the mission, no matter what happens.

Nail-biting descent achieved after spacecraft slams into Martian atmosphere at 12,300mph

After a seven-month, 300m-mile journey, Nasa’s Mars InSight probe has reached its destination and touched down near the red planet’s equator.

Nail-biting descent achieved after spacecraft slams into Martian atmosphere at 12,300mph
and ended minutes later with the probe settled on the ground, its thrusters quiet.
Mission scientists cheered, hugged and fist-bumped at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California when the lander beamed home signals of its arrival on the planet. “It was intense; you could feel the emotion,” said Jim Bridenstine, Nasa’s administrator. “What a day for Nasa.”


InSight lander touches down on Mars – as it happened

InSight’s landing spot, Elysium Planitia, is one of the most boring places on the alien world: a vast, smooth lava plain that the US space agency calls “the biggest parking lot on Mars”. But a featureless, and hopefully quiet, landscape is precisely what InSight needs for its mission to map the interior of the planet.
“This is our first opportunity to look deep inside another planet, to look at the structure and find out why it ended up the way it did,” said Rain Irshad, the autonomous systems group leader at RAL Space in Oxfordshire, and one of several UK scientists who worked on InSight’s instruments.
InSight sent its first picture back within minutes of its new home. It was smudged and obscured by dust kicked up during the landing, but much clearer pictures are expected to be sent back soon.

The $814m (£635m) lander will use a suite of instruments to study the makeup and dimensions of the planet’s core, mantle and crust. Armed with that data, scientists hope to learn how Mars – and other rocky worlds – formed at the dawn of the solar system 4.6bn years ago

Sending a probe to Mars, whether to land, orbit or fly past, is a risky business: only 40% of missions have succeeded. Nasa is the only space agency to have pulled off a Mars landing, most recently in 2012 when the Curiosity rover was winched to the surface by a hovering “sky crane”.

In 2016, the European Space Agency attempted to put its own lander on Mars, but the Schiaparelli probe shut down its retro-rockets too soon and smashed into the ground.

The InSight lander had to perform flawlessly to touch down safely. Soon after it hit the thin Martian atmosphere, it released a parachute, then blasted off its heat shield and fired retro-thrusters to slow its descent.
Confirmation that InSight had survived what Nasa called “the seven minutes of terror” was beamed back to Earth via satellites that trailed the probe to its destination.

InSight, which is short for Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, will use three instruments to study Mars.
A seismometer deployed by a robot arm will act as an ear to the ground and listen for tremors produced when subterranean rock faces slip past one another on geological fault lines. These pressure waves bounce around inside the planet, and can reveal crucial information about its structure.


Mission scientists expect InSight to record anything from a dozen to 100 Marsquakes of magnitude 3.5 or greater over the lander’s two-year mission. The seismometer is so sensitive it can detect vibrations smaller than the width of an atom.
“The most important question is whether Mars is seismically active,” said Neil Bowles, a planetary scientist at Oxford University, who worked on the spacecraft.
“We have indirect evidence for shaking on the surface, for example by looking at boulders rolling down slopes in images from orbit, but InSight will be the first mission to place a seismometer directly on the surface of Mars.


“Measuring Marsquakes will give information on Mars’ internal structure and hopefully reveal more about how the planet formed. Why is Mars smaller and with a lower density than Earth and Venus? It suggests that Mars’ formation and evolution was somehow different to Earth’s or some process in the early solar system prevented Mars from growing bigger.”
Another instrument, a heat probe, will burrow 5 metres into the ground and measure the rate at which heat rises through the planet.
In a third experiment, mission scientists will use antennas on the lander to track its position with such precision they can deduce how much Mars wobbles on its axis. The amount of wobble reflects the size of the planet’s core and whether it is molten or solid.

Earth’s rotating molten iron core generates the magnetic field that shields life from harmful radiation, and helps prevent the atmosphere from being stripped away by high-energy particles in the solar wind.
At some point in its history, Mars lost its magnetic field and much of its atmosphere, causing temperatures to drop and exposing the surface to intense radiation. InSight may help explain why, said Irshad.
“Are there conditions under the surface that might have meant life went down there in order to survive?” she said. “If it retreated beneath the surface, future missions might find it there.”

InSight probe reveals desolate landscape as dust settles after its arrival on Martian surface

This is the view across Elysium Planitia, the vast lava plain near the equator of Mars, where Nasa’s InSight lander touched down after a hair-raising descent on Monday. The probe snapped the image of the desolate landscape as the dust thrown up by its arrival was still settling around it.

Over the coming days, InSight will take more photos of the landing site and send them back to Earth, where scientists will use them to decide where the probe should place its instruments.

The lander’s seismometer will be an ear to the ground that listens for “marsquakes”, which shudder through the planet when slabs of underground rock fracture and slip. Another instrument will burrow into the ground and take the temperature of the red planet.

Hours after InSight touched down, the probe called home to say its solar panels had opened and were collecting what feeble sunlight reaches the planet. On a clear day the panels will generate 700W, enough to power a kitchen blender, and all the lander needs to operate.

Taken with a clear dust cover still in place on the camera lens, the picture was beamed up from the Martian surface to Nasa’s orbiting Odyssey spacecraft, and from there sent the 91m miles (146m kilometres) to Earth.