The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has already started planning for their next interplanetary mission, once again to Mars. The InSight lander is a stationary probe designed to drill thirty feet into the planet’s crust. The InSight mission, an acronym for Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport, was approved today on August 20, 2012. Planned to be designed and built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, the lander will land on Mars in 2016. InSight, like all other recent rovers, will be solar-powered.
The InSight mission will provide “insight” as to how Mars was formed at a relatively low projected cost of 425 million dollars. The recently landed Curiosity, Spirit (which was active from 2004 to 2010) and other rovers, have only scraped the Martian surface. Specifically, scientists still question whether the Martian surface has a molten core or a frozen center, or what factors prevent Mars from having a magnetic field. NASA calls Mars the “Goldilocks planet” because of its size, which scientists believe to be big enough to be formed like the Earth but also small enough so that the internal heating processes still exist. By discovering the environment on Mars, scientists may be able to solve problems back home on Mars.
InSight is part of NASA’s Discovery program which funds low-cost missions. Because of its lower risk, NASA chose the InSight program over the Titan Mare Explorer, which would have landed on the methane lakes of Titan, a moon of Saturn.
Despite its low cost, questions are still raised: Is the project worth it? When will man finally land on Mars? Unmanned missions to Mars have slowly decreased in interest. According to CNN commentator Elizabeth Landau, the recent Curiosity was just “another box with wheels on Mars.”
The current Mars rover, Curiosity, is tasked with the objective of finding if microbial life every existed on Mars. Curiosity is equipped with a robotic arm, two gigabytes of flash memory, a rock-vaporizing laser, and a plutonium-fueled system that allows it to reach a top speed of 1.5 inches per second. Curiosity, expected to last 23 months, costs 2.6 billion dollars. Currently, NASA’s space budget is about 17.7 billion dollars, 59 billion million less than 2012, as the budget keeps shrinking.
