NASA selects new Mars mission

Just two weeks after landing its Curiosity rover on Mars, the US space agency has announced it will send another robot to the planet in 2016.


The InSight spacecraft will be a static lander that will carry instruments to investigate Mars' deep interior, BBC News reported.
According to scientists, this will give them a clearer idea of how the rocky planets formed - the Earth included.


InSight beat two other proposals in a competition to find Nasa's next relatively low-cost mission.


This so-called Discovery class of endeavour is cost-capped at $425m (£270m; 345m euros), although that figure does not include the rocket to launch the spacecraft.


InSight stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.


It will be led from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.


The design of the lander leans heavily on the successful Phoenix probe put on the Red Planet in 2008. But although the 2016 venture will look very similar, it will carry very different instrumentation.


A seismic experiment will listen for "marsquakes" and use this information to map the boundaries between the rock layers inside Earth's neighbour.


It will determine if the planet has a liquid or solid core, and provide some clues as to why its surface is not divided up into tectonic plates as on Earth.


Key components of this package will come from France and the UK.


InSight will also push a German-built thermal probe into the surface to gauge Mars' temperature profile. This will reveal how the planet is cooling.


It will also deliver another sensor that will very accurately determine the degree to which the planet wobbles on its axis.


All the data combined will inform researchers about the internal state of Mars today and how it has changed through the eons.


"This is science that has been compelling for many years," said John Grunsfeld, who heads up Nasa's science division.


"Seismology, for instance, is the standard method by which we've learned to understand the interior of the Earth - and we have no such knowledge for Mars.


"This has been something the principal investigator (JPL's Bruce Banerdt) of this mission has been trying to get to Mars for nearly three decades, and so I'm really thrilled that this is now at a mature stage where he has been able to propose something that fits within the cost and schedule constraints of the Discovery programme."