NASA Touches Mars with InSight

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena has been finally successful in placing InSight on the surface of the planet Mars. InSight is an unmanned spacecraft, which has also managed to send back its first picture to NASA after reaching the Red Planet. InSight is built at the cost of $993 million.

The spacecraft covered nearly seven years to reach the Red planet, starting from its design and launch to final touch down, which marked NASA’s eighth successful landing on the planet Mars. From to the first communication received from the Mars, the vehicle appeared to be in good shape.

The main objective behind this project is to listen to the quakes and tremors as a way to unveil the Red Planet’s inner mysteries, like how it was formed billions of years ago, it will also try to find out how other rocky planets like Earth, took their shape.

The spacecraft is NASA’s first attempt to touch down on Earth’s neighboring planets, since the Curiosity rover arrived in the year 2012. So far, more than half of the 43 attempts to reach Mars with rovers, probes and orbiters by space agencies across the world have failed.

NASA has become the only space agency to have made it to Mars, which has thus invested in the robotic missions while preparing for the first Mars-bound human missions in the 2030s. NASA’s associate administrator, Thomas Zurbuchen accepted, “We never take Mars for granted. Mars is hard”.

Though in this mission, InSight contains some key instruments that were contributed by various European space agencies. For example, France’s Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) contributed to the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument, which is the key element for sensing the quake waves.

The German Aerospace Center (DLR) provided a self-hammering mole that can burrow 16 feet (five meters) into the surface of the Mars thereby helping in measuring the heat flow.

Spain’s Centro de Astrobiologia has helped in the making of spacecraft’s wind sensors. Other important contributions came from the Space Research Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Astronika, Oxford University, Britain’s Imperial College London and the Swiss Institute of Technology.

With the help of all these instruments, Scientists and Investigators will now study the geological process, as informed by Bruce Banerdt, InSight's Principal Investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA. He also said that the goal of the mission is to understand the inside of Mars in three dimensions, “so we understand the inside of Mars as well as we have come to understand the outside of Mars”.

Thus the landing of InSight on Mars has opened various avenues for exploration and also in the course of time, it will help us understand various mysteries of the other world.