At the sign of any seismic activity on Mars, the craft – about the size of a family auto – will take a picture of the inside of the planet. “Are they happening deep in Mars?”
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In another first for the mission, a pair of briefcase-size satellites will launch aboard InSight, break free after liftoff, then follow the spacecraft for six months all the way to Mars.
NASA WANTS TO DETECT THE FIRST MARSQUAKE Rather than search for water like previous Mars rovers, including Curiosity, InSight will study the planet’s structure.
NASA chief scientist Jim Green said this launch will be special. These miniature satellites will serve as communication relays for InSight while it tests new communications and navigation capabilities for succeeding missions.
Mars InSight’s radio antennas will be used for science as well: They’ll receive transmissions from Earth and sent them back in such a way that the signals’ subtle Doppler shift can be measured precisely.
As NASA’s Insight probe begins its trip to Mars on Saturday, the spacecraft is tasked with studying Mars’ insides. The company is a world-recognized aerospace and defense leader that provides propulsion and energetics to the space, missile defense and strategic systems, tactical systems and armaments areas, in support of domestic and worldwide markets. If the seal breaks, the sensors won’t work and the equipment could get destroyed by the harsh, Martian environment, such as the extreme temperature that ranges from 80 degrees Fahrenheit to -200 degrees Fahrenheit.
“I’ll be much more happy when I get the first data”, he says. They will be the first CubeSats flown into deep space.
The US space agency is giving fans the opportunity to watch tomorrow’s launch through livestream video. “As soon as we’re down we’ll breathe more than a sigh of relief”, he said.
InSight scientists hope to record hundreds to thousands of small Martian quakes.
The trip to Mars will be hard. The two CubeSats are also expected to phone home within minutes, cutting down on the amount of time traditionally required for a spacecraft to communicate with Mission Control on Earth.
“We are expecting visibility to be bad”, she said. “The schedule and cost constraints also created a lot of innovation”. And when will we start seeing the fruits of its labour? “We still have people calling and looking to book through or being able to come for at least one of the nights”.
Propulsion is a challenge, Baker notes: “Physics still dictates certain things”.
MarCO-A and MarCO-B, which the engineering team calls them “Wall-E” and “Eva”, will be NASA’s first deep-space CubeSats, which are affordable, bite-sized satellites. “Is really a science of understanding the early solar system”.
A NASA engineer tests MarCO’s solar array. Weather permitting, the launch could be visible as far east as Nevada and Arizona. “Even in an extremely harsh environment, there can still be life”, Hynek noted. “The radiation is worse, the thermal environment is worse, the distances are greater, the power is less”. Perhaps InSight will be able to answer some very important questions like why Earth is a habitable paradise and Mars is a cold and barren rock.
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If the effort succeeds, it will mark the first unequivocal detection of tremors known as marsquakes-and explain long-standing mysteries about the planet’s inner structure and how it evolved. “The earth is so active that the evidence of all those processes has gotten basically erased by plate tectonics”, he said.
