First NASA lander to study Mars' interior launches from California
The Mars InSight probe is shown in the artist's rendition on the surface of Mars, due to lift off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, US on May 5, 2018 in this image obtained on May 3, 2018. NASA Handout via Reuters
An Atlas 5 rocket soared in space early on Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying NASA's first robotic lander designed for exploration the deep interior of another planet on its travel to Mars.
The Mars InSight probe took off from the central California coast at 4:05 am PDT, treating early-rising residents across the wide spectrum of the brightest pre-dawn spectacle of the first US interplanetary spacecraft to launch over the Pacific.
The lander will be lifted aloft for NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) atop a two-stage, 19-story Atlas 5 rocket from the fleet of United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co.
The payload will be released about 90 minutes after launch on a 301 million mile (484 million km) flight to Mars.It is due to reach its destination in six months, landing on a broad, smooth plain close to the planet's equator called the Elysium Planitia
That will put InSight roughly 373 miles (600 km) from the 2012 site of the car-shaped Mars rover Curiosity.
The new 800-pound (360-kg) spacecraft marks the 21st US-launched Martian exploration, dating to the Mariner fly-by missions of the 1960s. Nearly two dozen other Mars missions have been launched by other nations.
Once settled, the solar-powered InSight will spend two years - about one Martian year - plumbing the depths of the planet's interior for clues to how Mars took form and, by extension, the origins of the Earth and other rocky planets.
InSight's primary instrument is a French-built seismometer, designed to detect the slightest vibrations from "marsquakes" around the planet. The device, to be placed on the surface of the lander's robot arm, is so sensitive it can measure a seismic wave just one -half the radius of a hydrogen atom
Scientists expect to see a dozen to 100 marsquakes over the course of the mission, producing data to help them decimate the depth, density and composition of the planet's core, the rocky mantle around it and the outermost layer, the crust.
The Viking probes of the mid-1970s were equipped with seismometers, too, but they were bolted to the top of the landers, a design that proved largely ineffective.
Apollo missions to the moon brought seismometers to the moon surface as well, detecting thousands of moonquakes and meteorite impacts. But InSight is expected to produce planetary seismic tremors beyond Earth on the first meaningful data.
InSight will also be fitted with a German-made drill to the burrow as much as 16 feet (5 meters) underground, pulling behind it a rope-like thermal probe to measure heat flowing from inside the planet.
Meanwhile, a special transmitter on the lander will send radio signals back to Earth, tracking Mars' subtle rotational wobble to reveal the size of the planet's core and possibly whether it remains molten.
Hitching a ride aboard the same rocket that launches InSight will be a pair of miniature satellites called CubeSats, which will fly on their own paths behind the lander in a first deep-space test of that technology.