NASA has given the go-ahead to start construction for a Mars Lander to be used for the Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission.
The space agency will use the lander to find more information about the inside of the Red Planet, according to Universe Today.
The mission will focus on finding out how planets develop their cores, mantles and crusts.
Scientists will work with tools that have never been used before on Mars to gather information on these interior zones, Jet Propulsion Observatory reported. InSight will launch in March 2016 from Vanderberg Air Force Base on the California coast. The mission will be the first interplanetary mission to launch from California, and will also help NASA with its goal of sending humans on a mission to Mars in the 2030s.
InSight team leaders were given approval to move into the next stage of preparation after presenting mission design results to a NASA review board last week.
"Our partners across the globe have made significant progress in getting to this point and are fully prepared to deliver their hardware to system integration starting this November, which is the next major milestone for the project," said Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We now move from doing the design and analysis to building and testing the hardware and software that will get us to Mars and collect the science that we need to achieve mission success."
The Mars lander will include a robotic arm built with "Surface and borrowing" instruments developed by the National Center of Space Studies (CNES), a space agency from France, and the German Center for Aerospace (DLR), Universe Today reported.
The mission planners expect the lander will sit close to Mars' equator and will provide information about the planet's interior for at least two years. The lander will place the seismometer on the surface. The seismometer will be covered up to protect it from the wind and cold. The robot will also hammer a heat-flow probe into the ground almost three to five yards deep.
The space agency is also planning an experiment that will use a radio link between InSight and NASA's Deep Space Network antennae on Earth to measure the wobble in Mars' rotation, which could reveal whether the planet has a solid or liquid core, Jet Propulsion Observatory reported.
Temperature sensors, a pressure sensor and a magnetometer will be used for the experiment.
