MARS The INSIDE story
ANOTHER CRAFT HAS JOINED THE MARS ARMADA with the Insight lander’s touch down expected (at the time of printing) in late November. What further science can a stationary lander add? After all, the Red Planet’s skies and surface are already plied by eight spacecraft. Curiosity roves up the slopes of towering ‘Mount Sharp,’ and Opportunity might yet recover from its deep hibernation during this year’s global dust storm. NASA also has Odyssey, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and MAVEN in orbit. ESA operates Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, while India’s space agency flies its Mars Orbiter Mission. China, Japan, and the United Arab Emirates all have Mars spacecraft under construction.
The answer lies in the mission’s full name: Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (though even its scientists often don’t spell this out in their papers). ‘Insight,’ the much simpler backronym it’s known by, is designed specifically to understand the structure of Mars’s deep interior.
If successful, this spacecraft will reveal the thicknesses and characteristics of Mars’s interior layers, determine how fast the planet is losing
