NASA is voyaging back to Mars, and assuming all systems will be a “go,” viewers will be able to watch the two-stage Atlas V 401 launch early Saturday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base, in Santa Barbara County, California. This will be NASA’s first interplanetary trip originating from the West Coast.
“The goal of the Mars Exploration Program is to explore Mars and to provide a continuous flow of scientific information and discovery through a carefully selected series of robotic orbiters, landers and mobile laboratories interconnected by a high-bandwidth Mars–Earth communications network,” according to NASA.
After its projected six-and-a-half month journey, NASA will deploy a lander (not a rover) named InSight, which will study marsquakes (as opposed to earthquakes) to determine what’s beneath the crust of the Red Planet.
That, in turn, may lead scientists to learn how the planet was formed. It may also lead researchers to discover how some planets become habitable like Earth, while others remain desolate.
“To really understand why those processes happen at the surface, we have to know what’s going on in the inside,” Suzanne Smrekar, the deputy principal investigator for InSight, told The Verge. “You have to look under the hood.”
In addition to InSight, the Atlas V rocket will carry along two smaller spacecraft, satellites about the size of cereal boxes called as CubeSats, referred to as MarCO-A and MarCO-B.
They’ll be deployed along with the lander to act as a communications link between InSight and NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is already orbiting the Red Planet. It will then relay the data to Earth.
Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator on NASA’s InSight mission, said the lander is bound to provide some surprises, NPR reported.
"One always expects something completely out of the ordinary when you're completely in the dark to begin with," he ssaid.
Lift off is scheduled for 4:05 a.m. local time, which would be 7:05 a.m. Eastern. If, for any reason, the launch has to be scrubbed, 35 backup launches have been set up from May 5 through June 8.
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