NASA announces new Mars mission

NASA has selected a new Mars mission for launch in March 2016, officials announced on 20 August. InSight will investigate the interior of the red planet to determine whether its core is solid or liquid, and it will study Mars’s crust to see why it is not divided into tectonic plates that drift like Earth’s.

InSight will be the 12th mission in the Discovery program, which sponsors frequent, cost-capped solar system exploration missions with highly focused scientific goals. The newly announced probe has a price ceiling of $425 million in fiscal year 2010 dollars. That cap does not include the cost of the launch vehicle, which hasn’t yet been chosen, said James Green, director of NASA’s planetary science division.

InSight builds on spacecraft technology used in NASA’s 2007 Phoenix mission, which determined that water existed near the surface in the Martian polar regions. Like Phoenix, InSight will be solar powered, and the new craft is expected to last for two years because it will land near the equator, a relatively “benign” environment compared with the poles, Green said. Phoenix operated for around five months, but its solar panels were unable to survive the Martian winter.

The project will be managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where W. Bruce Banerdt is the principal investigator. Partners include the German Aerospace Center (DLR), which will build a subsurface heat probe to measure the flow of heat from the interior, and France’s space agency CNES, which will contribute a seismometer. JPL will provide an onboard geodetic instrument to determine the planet’s rotation axis, a robotic arm to deploy the instruments on the Martian surface, and two cameras to monitor the instruments.

NASA received 28 responses when it solicited Discovery mission proposals in June 2010. InSight was one of three proposed missions selected last year to receive funding to conduct preliminary design studies and analyses. The other two proposals were for missions to a comet and to Saturn’s moon Titan.

John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s science directorate, said InSight seemed the most likely project of the three to be completed with the available resources.