After mapping out the inside of Mars, NASA’s InSight mission ends this year
After mapping out the inside of Mars, NASA’s InSight mission ends this year
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NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory mission to Mars will take around 13 months from start to finish in 2017. This is a milestone mission for the agency, and is helping define the future of Mars science for a long time to come.
Since its inception, InSight has helped NASA map out the outermost half of the planet, and has carried out many of the most important missions since its inception. InSight also has helped the agency better understand the geological stage of the planet, and can now do many of the science that was done on Earth, like the planet’s formation.
The mission will be by NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSSL), which also includes a new rover, Curiosity. The rover will take a short walk, complete with its own, rather strange encounter with the Martian surface. A closer look at the rover’s history, which will give us insight into what may have happened to its plume.
What kind of research was done to gather the data?
We did a lot of ground-based research, to search for oil and gas. We found a lot of questionable things, but we were able to get an understanding of the geological composition of those rocks that were deposited there.
The concentration of mineral content in the atmosphere from the rock at the time of the journey was relatively low. The water on the Martian surface was very very high, so it’s an interesting situation, but we had to do the best we could to ensure this information was kept out of the public’s hands. This took a long time for us, because it took a very long time in this case.
What did you learn about the mounds that we found? Did you get any surprises?
The first thing to know is that we had to identify an important feature of the mounds, which is that they came from the Martian at both north and south ends of the planet. We found 60 organic materials, and that wasn’t even an option, because because the mounds are so different from one another, they would have been very different.
We thought that the only way to detect the presence of methane is by looking at the surface, but there’s a much more complicated way, because it’s very difficult to find things in the atmosphere and therefore it’s quite difficult to try to find them.
InSight has actually been able to get a sense of the Martian history, which is clearly influenced by the way the planet actually formed. It did find some interesting features that really blew our minds.
What are some of these features that you found and where did they come from?
The first thing that we found that we knew about was that there’s been a lot of secrecy around the discovery, because there’s a lot of secrecy around this.
The next thing that we found was a relatively small group of potentially important volcanic rocks that were forming on our way to this part of the planet. These rocks were extremely different from previous eruptions of that kind. We just didn’t believe that they were actually from Mars, because of all the uncertainties that come from what we know about the sources of the methane, but we had to have a good handle on what they represented.
This is a surprise, because this is a strange place where people are not sure what they’re talking about. We believe that there are some areas of the asteroid belt [on Mars] that we’d like to find out about. There’s also another area that we’d like to find out more about.
Lead author Thomas Searle says that the majority of the mounds found by InSight were lignite, a soft rock found in a desert on Mars.
“Lignite is something like a rare
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