WASHINGTON,
May 27, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/
-- Testing is underway on NASA's next mission on the journey to
Mars, a stationary lander scheduled to launch in March 2016.
The lander is called InSight, an abbreviation for Interior
Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat
Transport. It is about the size of a car and will be the first
mission devoted to understanding the interior structure of the Red
Planet. Examining the planet's deep interior could reveal clues
about how all rocky planets, including Earth, formed and
evolved.
The current testing will help ensure InSight can operate in and
survive deep space travel and the harsh conditions of the Martian
surface. The spacecraft will lift off from Vandenberg Air Force
Base in California, and land on
Mars about six months later.
The technical capabilities and knowledge gained from Insight,
and other Mars missions, are crucial to NASA's journey to Mars,
which includes sending astronauts to the Red Planet in the
2030s.
"Today, our robotic scientific explorers are paving the way,
making great progress on the journey to Mars," said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science
Division at the agency's headquarters in Washington. "Together, humans and robotics
will pioneer Mars and the solar system."
During the environmental testing phase at Lockheed Martin's
Space Systems facility near Denver, the lander will be exposed to extreme
temperatures, vacuum conditions of nearly zero air pressure
simulating interplanetary space, and a battery of other tests over
the next seven months. The first will be a thermal vacuum test in
the spacecraft's "cruise" configuration, which will be used during
its seven-month journey to Mars. In the cruise configuration, the
lander is stowed inside an aeroshell capsule and the spacecraft's
cruise stage – for power, communications, course corrections and
other functions on the way to Mars -- is fastened to the
capsule.
"The assembly of InSight went very well and now it's time to see
how it performs," said Stu Spath,
InSight program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems,
Denver. "The environmental testing
regimen is designed to wring out any issues with the spacecraft so
we can resolve them while it's here on Earth. This phase takes
nearly as long as assembly, but we want to make sure we deliver a
vehicle to NASA that will perform as expected in extreme
environments."
Other tests include vibrations simulating launch and checking
for electronic interference between different parts of the
spacecraft. The testing phase concludes with a second thermal
vacuum test in which the spacecraft is exposed to the temperatures
and atmospheric pressures it will experience as it operates on the
Martian surface.
The mission's science team includes U.S. and international
co-investigators from universities, industry and government
agencies.
"It's great to see the spacecraft put together in its launch
configuration," said InSight Project Manager Tom Hoffman at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL), Pasadena, California. "Many
teams from across the globe have worked long hours to get their
elements of the system delivered for these tests. There still
remains much work to do before we are ready for launch, but it is
fantastic to get to this critical milestone."
The InSight mission is led by JPL's Bruce Banerdt. The Centre National d'Etudes
Spatiales, France's space agency,
and the German Aerospace Center are each contributing a science
instrument to the two-year scientific mission. InSight's
international science team includes researchers from Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.
JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in
Washington. InSight is part of
NASA's Discovery Program, managed by the agency's Marshall Space
Flight Center in Huntsville,
Alabama. Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company built the
lander.
For addition information about the mission, visit:
http://insight.jpl.nasa.gov
More information about NASA's journey to Mars is available
online at:
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/journeytomars
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SOURCE NASA