Earth’s future may be more than 30 million miles away. At least that’s what NASA hinted at when it decided to move forward with its newest Mars discovery mission.
InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, will place the first “geophysical observatory” rover on Mars in September 2016, UF announced Tuesday. A solar-powered lander will monitor the planet’s vital signs for about two years.
“We will greatly enhance our knowledge of the interior of Mars with a relatively small amount of data,” said UF geological sciences assistant professor Mark Panning, a member of the InSight team.
Panning said the lander’s seismometer, an instrument that will monitor quakes on Mars, will allow scientists to learn the planet’s core size and whether it’s liquid or solid.
“A big part of how planets evolve is how they get rid of heat,” Panning said. “Internal heat is what drives what planets do.”
In 1976, NASA’s Viking Mission to Mars placed two seismometers on the planet, but equipment malfunctions kept most of the data from getting back to Earth.
“Seismometers are how we’ve learned nearly everything we know about the inside of the Earth,” Panning said. “This is a chance to get data back from another planet.”
Contact Michael Scott Davidson at mdavidson@alligator.org.
