New Mars lander set to launch in March 2016.
NASA has begun testing a new Mars Lander that will give us a virtual tour of the red planet. The lander is set to be launched in March 2016, and is called InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport). The team working on the spacecraft is comprised of scientists from Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the US. Even its instrumentation is multinational. The Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (France) and the German Aerospace Center are each contributing an instrument to the mission, which is led by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
What will the new Mars Lander look like?
The Mars Lander will quite soon be launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and should be on Mars around six months after. It will be around the size of a car, and should be able to withstand nearly zero air pressure, extreme temperatures, and other nasty things. The upcoming tests that the lander will be subject to should determine how well it would perform under such tough conditions, since they’re the kind of thing it’d be facing on Mars. Other tests include tests for vibration resistance, since vibration is strong at launch, and a check for electronic interference between the different parts of the craft.
What is the new Mars Lander’s core mission?
The new lander will be the first craft ever charged with exploring the interior structure of Mars. It will hopefully give us clues as to how rocky planets like Earth and Mars formed and changed over the years. The mission will also pave the way for future manned missions to our red neighbor, so it’s important that the lander is well-engineered and thoroughly tested. The mission has so many countries and space agencies collaborating that it makes a poster for international cooperation. Hopefully, all will go according to plan, and the Mars Lander team will be able to launch the new spacecraft in March, 2016. It would certainly be interesting to learn more about a neighboring planet not too different from our own.
NASA Now Testing New Mars Lander
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