‘Mars, here I come!’ NASA’s InSight launches from California on a six-month journey

NASA’s newest mission InSight, developed to probe deep beneath the surface of Mars, began its 300-million mile journey from Vandenberg Air Force Base. The pre-dawn launch was a rare spectacle for West Coast residents.

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This post was syndicated from Digital Trends. Click here to read the full text on the original website. </s> In this still image taken from NASATV, the exhaust plume of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas-V rocket with the NASA InSight spacecraft is seen as the rocket launches on May 5, 2018, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — With the orange flames of its engine lighting up the foggy sky for miles around, a car-sized Mars lander rocketed into space early Saturday in a first-of-its-kind launch from California on a mission to probe beneath the surface of the Red Planet.

The nearly $1 billion Mars InSight probe blasted off shortly after 4 a.m. local time, roaring south down the coast to the delight of crowds gathered on beaches and church parking lots to watch in the pre-dawn darkness. The lander's two-year mission aims to understand what makes the Red Planet like Earth and help advance the search for new homes for our species.

"It's unbelievable. It's literally unbelievable. I just stand here in awe," said InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt a few minutes before launch. Banerdt has been shepherding the project for nearly a decade, through construction and a scrubbed 2016 launch due to an equipment failure. Scientists had to wait two years until Mars and the Earth aligned again so the probe could start its approximately 200-day journey

This was NASA’s first interplanetary launch from the West Coast, a decision made in large part because Vandenberg’s launch pads are less busy than the ones at Cape Canaveral’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The Atlas 5 rocket carrying the Mars InSight probe launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base, as seen from the San Gabriel Mountains more than 100 miles away, on May 5, 2018 near Los Angeles, California.

InSight’s main mission is to check for quakes beneath Mars’ surface, which will help us learn how our solar system was created and lay the groundwork for similar exploration of potentially habitable planets elsewhere in the universe. Although Earth and Mars are generally formed of the same material, scientists want to know why the two planets ended up different. In addition to science experiments, the lander also carries two tiny silicon wafers engraved with the names of 2.4 million people who signed up via a public awareness campaign.

InSight is expected to reach Mars around Thanksgiving of this year, hitting the thin Martian atmosphere at about 13,200 mph, and then slowing down through friction, a parachute, and then right before reaching the surface, with thrusters. Even if the probe reaches Mars, there’s no guarantee of success: Missions to the Red Planet have just a 40% success rate, NASA said.

"The scary part is when we get to Mars," said Tom Hoffman, the InSight project manager for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "You never know what Mars is going to throw at you."

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas-V rocket with the NASA InSight spacecraft onboard is seen on May 5, 2018, shortly after the mobile service tower was rolled back late 04 May 2018, at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, USA.

Federal taxpayers have provided about $813 million for the lander, with another $180 million from Germany and France. JPL also funded an additional $18.5 million to test two shoebox-sized “cubesats” that can act like cellphone towers, relaying information from the lander back to Earth. Those cubesats use inexpensive off-the-shelf technology and will help monitor the lander’s descent. If all goes well, this will be the first time cubesats have been used anywhere but in Earth orbit and could lay the groundwork for their use in other space exploration as humans expand our search of the stars.

By early 2019, scientists hope InSight’s instruments will be reporting back everything from how often the planet quakes to how warm the soil is, thanks to a probe designed to burrow nearly 20 feet below ground. That probe will be “picked” off the top of the lander by a robotic arm, the first time one has been used on another planet. Color cameras will photograph the area around the lander, which was built to withstand temperatures as low as minus-148 degrees below zero. Because Mars is geologically more stable than Earth, its interior may hold answers that have been erased here at home. </s> Ground crews at Vandenberg Air Force Base on California’s Central Coast hoisted NASA’s InSight Mars lander atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket Monday, kicking off nearly two weeks of integrated tests and checkouts before the probe’s interplanetary launch window opens May 5.

Enclosed within the Atlas 5’s metallic 13.8-foot (4.2-meter) diameter shroud, the InSight spacecraft was transferred from an Astrotech payload processing facility to Space Launch Complex 3-East at Vandenberg early Monday. A crane lifted the probe top the Atlas 5 rocket protected inside the launch pad’s mobile gantry, and technicians mated the payload on top of the Atlas 5’s Centaur upper stage.

With the addition of InSight and its aerodynamic enclosure, the Atlas 5 rocket stands 188 feet (57 meters) tall.

No photos of payload lift operation were released by NASA or ULA as of Tuesday afternoon.

The final assembly of the Atlas 5 rocket is one of the last major steps before launch. Engineers will check electrical connections between the launcher and its payload in a series of tests over the next few days, setting up for final readiness reviews next week and the start of countdown preparations the evening of Friday, May 4, with the retraction of the mobile service tower at the SLC-3E launch pad.

InSight has a two-hour launch predawn window May 5 opening at 4:05 a.m. PDT (7:05 a.m. EDT; 1105 GMT). The nearly $1 billion mission, funded primarily by NASA with contributions from France and Germany, has until June 8 to launch from Vandenberg, when the ever-changing positions of Earth and Mars in the solar system make a direct trip possible. Mars launch opportunities come once every 26 months.

The lander will arrive at Mars on Nov. 26, regardless of the launch date from May 5 through June 8.

InSight will be the first mission to another planet to launch from Vandenberg, a military base on the Pacific coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Vandenberg Air Force Base is typically host to launches into polar orbit, a type of orbit usually tailored for climate research missions, spy satellites and some communication applications.

NASA’s interplanetary probes are usually reserved for launches from Cape Canaveral, where rockets take off toward the east over the Atlantic Ocean for safety reasons. A launch toward the east gains an extra boost from the speed of Earth’s rotation, allowing a rocket to carry a heavier payload.

But InSight is small — it will weigh around 1,530 pounds (694 kilograms) at launch — well below the lift capability of the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket, which will fly in its basic “401” configuration with a four-meter payload fairing and no solid rocket boosters.

That means the Atlas 5 will not need the extra energy imparted during an eastward launch from Cape Canaveral, and ULA and NASA agreed to launch InSight from Vandenberg. Fewer Atlas 5 missions are scheduled from Vandenberg, so officials wanted to reduce the workload at ULA’s busier launch base in Florida.

“We’re really excited,” said Lt. Col. Kenneth Decker, commander of the 4th Space Launch Squadron at Vandenberg, in an interview with Spaceflight Now earlier this year. “Since it’s not a classified mission and it’s more public, it’s fun for our squadron because we can interact a little more and share information with our families and other people.”

The 4th Space Launch Squadron provides support for ULA’s Atlas and Delta rocket missions at Vandenberg, a launch manifest that is primarily comprised of secret spy satellites for the U.S. government.

Designers based the InSight lander on NASA’s Phoenix probe, which launched in August 2007 and touched down on the northern polar plains of Mars in May 2008. Diminishing solar power and cold temperatures limited Phoenix’s lifetime to about five months — two months longer than its three-month prime mission.

InSight will head for a broad plain near the Martian equator with ample sunlight year-round. Officials selected the landing site in Elysium Planitia for its safety — there are few steep slopes or huge boulders. Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, calls it “the biggest parking lot on Mars.”

A robotic arm on InSight will place a French-built seismometer on the surface of Mars near the lander, and a heat probe provided by the German space agency, DLR, will burrow up to 16 feet (5 meters) underground to measure thermal energy coming from the red planet’s interior.

Scientists will collect the seismic and thermal data to find out about the structure of Mars’s crust, mantle and core. The information will help geologists understand how rocky planets like Mars, and Earth, formed in the early solar system.

The geologic record dating back to the birth of the planets some 4.5 billion years ago has been erased on Earth.

ULA’s launch team at Vandenberg began assembling the Atlas 5 rocket on its launch pad at Vandenberg on March 3 with the stacking of the kerosene-fueled first stage booster.

The Atlas 5’s Centaur upper stage, powered by an Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10 engine, was installed on top of the first stage March 6. The Centaur engine, consuming liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, will dispatch the InSight probe with enough velocity to escape Earth’s gravity and head for Mars.

Two days later, on March 8, a boattail structure was added to the top of the Centaur stage. The boattail provides an aerodynamic and structural connection between the Centaur and the Atlas 5’s payload fairing.

A pair of CubeSats that will accompany InSight to Mars were installed on their carrier aboard the Centaur upper stage last month. The CubeSats will fly by Mars and attempt to beam telemetry from InSight back to Earth during the lander’s descent.

The launch team completed a countdown rehearsal March 22, during which the Atlas 5 was loaded with liquid propellants to simulate launch day procedures. The “wet dress rehearsal” is not part of a typical Atlas 5 launch campaign, but managers added the test to wring out any potential problems with the rocket well ahead of liftoff due to InSight’s tight interplanetary launch period. </s> CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A robotic geologist armed with a hammer and quake monitor rocketed toward Mars on Saturday, May 5, aiming to land on the red planet and explore its mysterious insides.

In a twist, NASA launched the Mars InSight lander from California rather than Florida’s Cape Canaveral. It was the first interplanetary mission ever to depart from the West Coast, drawing pre-dawn crowds to fog-socked Vandenberg Air Force Base and rocket watchers down the California coast into Baja.

“This is a big day. We’re going back to Mars!” said NASA’s new boss, Jim Bridenstine. “This is an extraordinary mission with a whole host of firsts.”

The spacecraft will take more than six months to get to Mars and start its unprecedented geologic excavations, traveling 300 million miles (485 million kilometers) to get there.

JPL is managing the InSight project for NASA’s Discovery Program. The spacecraft, including cruise stage and lander, was built and tested by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver.

InSight will dig deeper into Mars than ever before — nearly 16 feet, or 5 meters — to take the planet’s temperature. It will also attempt to make the first measurements of marsquakes, using a high-tech seismometer placed directly on the Martian surface.

The Atlas V rocket also gave a lift to a pair of mini test satellites, or CubeSats, meant to trail InSight all the way to Mars and then serve as a potential communication link. They popped off the rocket’s upper stage in hot pursuit of InSight, as elated launch controllers applauded and shook hands following the morning’s success.

The $1 billion mission involves scientists from the U.S., France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

NASA hasn’t put a spacecraft down on Mars since the Curiosity rover in 2012. The U.S., in fact, is the only country to successfully land and operate a spacecraft at Mars. It’s tough, complicated stuff. Only about 40 percent of all missions to Mars from all countries — orbiters and landers alike — have proven successful over the decades.

If all goes well, the three-legged InSight will descend by parachute and engine firings onto a flat equatorial region of Mars — believed to be free of big, potentially dangerous rocks — on Nov. 26. Once down, it will stay put, using a mechanical arm to place the science instruments on the surface.

“This mission will probe the interior of another terrestrial planet, giving us an idea of the size of the core, the mantle, the crust and our ability then to compare that with the Earth,” said NASA’s chief scientist Jim Green. “This is of fundamental importance to understand the origin of our solar system and how it became the way it is today.”

InSight’s principal scientist, Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said Mars is ideal for learning how the rocky planets of our solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. Unlike our active Earth, Mars hasn’t been transformed by plate tectonics and other processes, he noted.

Over the course of two Earth years — or one Martian year — scientists expect InSight’s three main experiments to provide a true 3-D image of the interior of Mars.

The lander is equipped with a seismometer for measuring marsquakes, a self-hammering probe for burrowing beneath the surface, and a radio system for tracking the spacecraft’s position and planet’s wobbly rotation, thereby revealing the size and composition of Mars’ core.

“InSight, for seismologists, will really be a piece of history, a new page of history,” said the Paris Institute of Earth Physics’ Philippe Lognonne, lead scientist of the InSight seismometer.

Problems with the French-supplied seismometer kept InSight from launching two years ago. California was always part of the plan.

NASA normally launches from Cape Canaveral, but decided to switch to California for InSight to take advantage of a shorter flight backlog. This was the first U.S. interplanetary mission to launch from somewhere other than Cape Canaveral.

It was so foggy at Vandenberg that spectators there could hear and feel the roar and rumble of the rocket, but couldn’t see it. It was a marvelous sight, though, farther south. The rocket’s bright orange flame was visible for some time as it arced upward across the dark sky west of greater Los Angeles.

Not even two weeks on the job, NASA’s new administrator, Bridenstine, observed the launch on monitors at space agency headquarters in Washington.

“I can’t think of a better way to start my day!” Bridenstine tweeted.

Associated Press writer John Antczak in Pasadena, California, contributed to this report.

Historically, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, based in La Canada Flintridge, has launched its robotic missions to Mars out of Cape Canaveral.

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. They won’t stop at Mars, just fly past.

PHOTOS: All systems go for InSight’s historic launch.

The launch didn’t cause the spectacular light show that set off awe (and some panic) during some previous Vandenberg launches, but early risers took to social media to share their glimpses.

In the predawn darkness, most viewers simply saw a tiny red or white dot inching along the horizon.

InSight is expected to land on Mars on Nov. 26. The $1 billion U.S.-European mission is dedicated to studying the innards of Mars, with a robotic geologist digging 15 feet into the Martian soil.

InSight’s goal: To capture the most precise measurements of images of the red planet ever. By measuring the planet’s seismic activity, JPL aims to document Mars’ interior structure and paint a sophisticate picture of the planet’s surface and infrastructure.

The part of the mission that delights Sci-Fi fans and space enthusiasts: Scientists hope the seismic waves could reveal underground pockets of water — and perhaps even locate sites where life of some sort could be possible. </s> NASA is set to launch InSight, a new robotic lander mission, to learn more about the interior of the red planet, and the launch will be one true spectacle for space enthusiasts across the globe.

The lander will be taking off on a United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V-401 rocket from Space Launch Complex-3 at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. And, according to a statement from NASA, the two-hour window for the launch opens in the pre-dawn hours of May 5, just around 4:05 a.m. PDT or 7:05 a.m. EDT.

While the lander will begin a six and a half month-long journey – around 485 million kilometers – to the red planet with this launch, it is worth noting this interplanetary mission, officially dubbed "Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport," will be the first one from the United States West Coast.

Before this, all such NASA missions launched from Florida and flew over the Atlantic to get an advantage of additional speed from our planet’s rotation. However, in this case, the payload is light and the rocket is powerful enough to fly southward over Pacific and take the whole thing into orbit 13 minutes after lift-off.

"For those Southern Californians who are interested in rockets or space exploration, or have insomnia, we hope to put on a great show this Saturday,” Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in the statement.

If all goes according to the agency’s plan, InSight and its two tiny communication cubsats "Wall-E" and "Eva," will reach Martian neighborhood in November.

That said, viewers should also note bad weather conditions, particularly fog, might create a little trouble for the space agency and affect a clear view of ATLAS V launch vehicle.

"We are anticipating this fog to be very shallow, about 200-600 feet above the pad," Kristina Williams from Air Force's 30th Space Wing, which manages launches from the Californian base, said during a pre-launch briefing.

As the Verge reports, the Space Wing says the rocket might pull-off the launch and soar through the fog, but in that situation, viewers might not be able to get a clear view unless they are standing far away from the base (check the sites to see the launch here). However, if the sky is clear, the launch could be seen from Santa Maria to San Diego.

There’s also a simpler, cozier way to see the launch of InSight – Livestream. NASA TV has been streaming the agency’s highly anticipated launches live and this one will also be no exception. The coverage is set to start at 6:30 a.m. ET and you can find the live feed from the channel below. If the launch gets delayed due to bad weather or any other situation at the last minute, the next backup date is Sunday. NASA has multiple opportunities to put InSight into the Martian orbit between May 5 and June 8.

“I’ve been to several rocket launches, but it is a whole different vibe when there is something you've been working on for years sitting in the nose cone waiting to get hurled beyond our atmosphere,” Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator at JPL, said. “But as exciting as launch day will be, it’s just a first step in a journey that should tell us not only why Mars formed the way it did, but how planets take shape in general." </s> In a first for the West Coast, an Atlas 5 rocket boosted a robotic Mars lander into space Saturday, the first step in a 171-day voyage to the red planet for a two-year, $1 billion mission to monitor marsquakes, probe the temperature of the core and map the planet's hidden interior.

With heavy fog blanketing Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles, the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5's first stage engine thundered to life at 4:05 a.m. PT (GMT-7; 7:05 a.m. ET), throttled up to full thrust and quickly pushed the 20-story-tall booster away from pad 3-East atop 860,000 pounds of thrust.

It was the first interplanetary launch from the West Coast, but fog blocked the view for spectators near the launch site as the rocket climbed away to the south over the Pacific Ocean. Long-range cameras, however, captured spectacular views as the rocket streaked away, trailing a brilliant plume of fiery exhaust.

The Atlas 5 did its job despite the fog -- a visibility guideline was waived by mission managers with all other systems "go" for flight -- and 13 minutes after liftoff, the rocket's Centaur second stage completed the first of two firings to put NASA's InSight Mars lander in a temporary parking orbit.

A second burn a little more than an hour later was planned to boost the spacecraft out of Earth's gravitational clutches, putting InSight onto a trajectory to Mars. If all goes well, the lander will touch down on a broad plain known as Elysium Palitia around 2 p.m. local time on Nov. 26.

InSight is the eighth lander NASA has sent to Mars. Since 1964, the United States has now launched 23 robotic spacecraft to the red planet at a cost of more than $20 billion in an evolving campaign to map out the red planet's surface, determine the role of water in its history and to search for signs of past habitability and the organic building blocks of life.

InSight is the first mission dedicated solely to learning more about the planet's interior in an attempt to glean clues about how rocky terrestrial planets like Earth formed during the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

"The goal of InSight is nothing less than to better understand the birth of the Earth, the birth of the planet we live on, and we're going to do that by going to Mars," said Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator of the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- InSight -- mission.

"How we get from a ball of featureless rock into a planet that may or may not support life is a key question," he said.

Earth is a very geologically active world, and much of the early record has been destroyed by continental drift and the churning of the mantle. As a result, "we're kind of at a loss to see, on the Earth, what's the evidence for what happened in those early years," Banerdt said.

"But we can go to Mars. Mars is a smaller planet, it is less active than the Earth, and so it has retained the fingerprints of those early processes in its basic structure -- the thickness of the crust, the composition of the mantle, the size and composition of its core.

"And by mapping out these boundaries, these various different sections of the inside of the planet, we can then understand better how the planet formed and how our planet got to be the way it is."

InSight is equipped with two primary instruments: the Seismic Experiment Interior Structure -- SEIS -- seismometer, provided by the French space agency, CNES, and the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe -- HP3 -- provided by the German Aerospace Agency, DLR. The two instruments cost the European space agencies about $180 million.

After a detailed photo survey of the surrounding terrain near the lander and repeated rehearsals on Earth, a robot arm on InSight's upper deck will be commanded to pick up both instruments and lower them to the surface.

The seismometer "is really the heart of the InSight mission," Banerdt said. "The seismometer is what allows us to see deep into the planet, to have insight into the planet, and it uses the seismic waves that are generated by marsquakes."

The instrument, protected by the elements by a down-shaped shield, is capable of measuring movements smaller than the width of a hydrogen atom. As seismic waves from marsquakes travel through the martian interior, they will pass through different types of rock and soil that will alter their shape.

"Scientists understand how to take the shapes of those wiggles, their frequency, their amplitude, the polarization, the timing, all kinds of properties of those waves and pull that information out and finally, after we've gotten many, many marsquakes from different directions, we can put together a three-dimensional view of the inside of Mars," Banerdt said.

The heat probe will use a motor and spring-driven hammer mechanism to pound its way down into the martian soil trailing a cable with sensitive temperature sensors. Pausing along the way to measure the thermal conductivity of the soil at different points, the probe could reach a maximum depth of about 15 feet.

The sensors on the trailing cable will measure slight differences in temperature between the surface and the probe's maximum depth, allowing scientists to extrapolate temperatures all the way to the core 2,000 miles below.

InSight's third investigation relies on the lander's radio system. By carefully analyzing slight changes in the radio signals from the spacecraft as Mars rotates on its axis and sweeps along its orbit, scientists can precisely locate the martian polar axis and measure how it slowly changes orientation.

"Over the course of a year, we can watch that north pole wobble just a little bit because of the core sloshing around inside the planet," Banerdt said. "And that will give us a very, very tight constraint on the size of that core, its density and so its composition."

"That tells us the structure of Mars, the structure of Mars tells us something about the processes that put that structure together, we can put that into our models, extrapolate to the Earth and understand how the Earth formed four and a half billion years ago. And that's really the crux of the science behind this mission." </s> NASA is going to Mars again, this time with the first spaceship dedicated to digging deep below the surface to find out what’s shaking on the red planet.

InSight is scheduled to launch May 5 from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on an Atlas V 401 rocket. The launch window opens at 4:05 a.m. PT (7:05 a.m. ET).

It will be the first NASA mission launched to another planet from the West Coast, and it’ll be visible to millions in Southern California from Santa Maria to San Diego. NASA’s previous interplanetary missions were launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

If it all goes as planned, after a six-month journey, the 790-pound (358-kilogram) probe will land on November 26, joining five other NASA spacecraft operating on and above Mars.

The mission’s principal investigator, Bruce Banerdt, told CNN via email that he was “already pretty crazy about Mars” when he was 8 or so, and his excitement about sending a spacecraft there “is really starting to get intense!”

Banerdt said he thinks InSight will fill the last gaping hole in NASA’s exploration of Mars.

“We have mapped the surface of the entire planet in terms of visible features, topography, gravity and magnetic fields,” he said.

“We have studied the atmosphere, both globally and at the surface. We have roved around the surface at four different places, studying the geology and piecing together the history of the surface. But until now, the vast regions of the planet deeper than a few miles, or so, (have) been almost completely unknown to us.”

He added, “InSight will change that with a single stroke.”

InSight will help scientists draw the first detailed map of the interior of Mars, and Banerdt said it’s hard to overstate how much science that map will create.

So, how do you study a planet that’s 75 million miles (121 million kilometers) away?

InSight doesn’t have wheels, so once it lands it stays put. It can’t roll around gathering up dirt to study. But it does have a 7.8-foot-long (2.4-meter) robotic arm. The arm will place a seismometer on the ground to detect “marsquakes” (think earthquakes, but on Mars, of course).

Another instrument will dig 16 feet (5 meters) into the ground, deeper than any instrument ever sent to Mars.

The arm has a camera that will snap color 3-D images, and there’s a second camera on the spaceship’s body that will provide wide-angle views.

“The first image will be taken less than an hour after touchdown and should be available on Earth within the first day,” Banerdt said. “We should have images of the landing area within a week.”

InSight will use its radio system to measure the wobble of Mars’ north pole to help scientists learn more about the shape of the planet.

And finally, Banerdt said, InSight “will have one of the best weather stations ever placed on Mars, measuring pressure, wind and temperature around the clock for at least a Martian year.”

InSight’s primary mission is for two years, but if all goes well, Banerdt said he’ll ask for an extension.

This new NASA spaceship won’t be going alone to Mars. Two suitcase-size spacecraft will be launched on the same rocket. They will trail behind InSight and will orbit Mars as part of a NASA experiment to see whether they can be used to relay data back to Earth.

The small spacecraft, called Mars Cube One, or MarCO-A and B, “have opened up a whole new frontier for space,” chief engineer Andy Klesh told CNN. He said this mission will be a “critical test of this new type of spacecraft and how NASA might use it to explore the solar system in the future.” </s> In a first for the West Coast, an Atlas 5 rocket boosted a robotic Mars lander into space Saturday, the first step in a six-and-a-half month voyage to the red planet for a two-year, $1 billion mission to monitor marsquakes, probe the temperature of the core and map the planet's hidden interior.

With heavy fog blanketing Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles, the United Launch Alliance Atlas 5's first stage engine thundered to life at 4:05 a.m. PT (GMT-7; 7:05 a.m. ET), throttled up to full thrust and quickly pushed the 20-story-tall booster away from pad 3-East atop 860,000 pounds of thrust.

It was the first interplanetary launch from the West Coast, but fog blocked the view for spectators near the launch site as the rocket climbed away to the south over the Pacific Ocean. Long-range cameras, however, captured spectacular views as the rocket streaked away, trailing a brilliant plume of fiery exhaust.

The Atlas 5 did its job despite the fog -- a visibility guideline was waived by mission managers with all other systems "go" for flight -- and 13 minutes after liftoff, the rocket's Centaur second stage completed the first of two firings to put NASA's InSight Mars lander in a temporary parking orbit.

The InSight lander is the first spacecraft devoted solely to studying the interior of Mars. In this artist's impression, two of the lander's primary instruments -- a sensitive seismometer with a dome-shaped weather shield and a sub-surface heat probe can be seen deployed on the surface. NASA

A second burn a little more than an hour later boosted the spacecraft out of Earth's gravitational clutches, putting InSight onto the planned trajectory to Mars. If all goes well, the lander will reach Mars in 205 days, touching down on a broad plain known as Elysium Palitia on Nov. 26.

"This is a big day, we're going back to Mars," said new NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. "We did it from the West Coast, which is a first ever. We're going to look deep inside the interior of Mars, we're going to create a 3D image of what's going on inside of Mars.

"This is an extraordinary mission with a whole host of firsts. It's important for our country, it's also important for the world. It really establishes American leadership in a lot of ways. ... Congratulations to everyone involved."

InSight is the eighth lander NASA has sent to Mars. Since 1964, the United States has now launched 23 robotic spacecraft to the red planet at a cost of more than $20 billion in an evolving campaign to map out the red planet's surface, determine the role of water in its history and to search for signs of past habitability and the organic building blocks of life.

InSight is the first mission dedicated solely to learning more about the planet's interior in an attempt to glean clues about how rocky terrestrial planets like Earth formed during the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.

"The goal of InSight is nothing less than to better understand the birth of the Earth, the birth of the planet we live on, and we're going to do that by going to Mars," said Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator of the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- InSight -- mission.

"How we get from a ball of featureless rock into a planet that may or may not support life is a key question," he said.

Earth is a very geologically active world, and much of the early record has been destroyed by continental drift and the churning of the mantle. As a result, "we're kind of at a loss to see, on the Earth, what's the evidence for what happened in those early years," Banerdt said.

The exhaust plume of a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket billows out in spectacular fashion as the booster propels NASA's InSight Mars lander out of the thick lower atmosphere following launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. InSight is the first mission devoted solely to studying the interior of the red planet to learn more about the processes that gave birth to Earth and other terrestrial worlds. NASA

"But we can go to Mars. Mars is a smaller planet, it is less active than the Earth, and so it has retained the fingerprints of those early processes in its basic structure -- the thickness of the crust, the composition of the mantle, the size and composition of its core.

"And by mapping out these boundaries, these various different sections of the inside of the planet, we can then understand better how the planet formed and how our planet got to be the way it is."

InSight is equipped with two primary instruments: the Seismic Experiment Interior Structure -- SEIS -- seismometer, provided by the French space agency, CNES, and the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe -- HP3 -- provided by the German Aerospace Agency, DLR. The two instruments cost the European space agencies about $180 million.

After a detailed photo survey of the surrounding terrain near the lander and repeated rehearsals on Earth, a robot arm on InSight's upper deck will be commanded to pick up both instruments and lower them to the surface.

The seismometer "is really the heart of the InSight mission," Banerdt said. "The seismometer is what allows us to see deep into the planet, to have insight into the planet, and it uses the seismic waves that are generated by marsquakes."

The instrument, protected from the elements by a dome-shaped shield, is capable of measuring movements smaller than the width of a hydrogen atom. As seismic waves from marsquakes travel through the martian interior, they will pass through different types of rock and soil that will alter their shape.

The InSight Mars lander, with its circular solar arrays deployed, during pre-flight testing. The seismometer's weather shield can be seen on the upper deck. NASA

"Scientists understand how to take the shapes of those wiggles, their frequency, their amplitude, the polarization, the timing, all kinds of properties of those waves and pull that information out and finally, after we've gotten many, many marsquakes from different directions, we can put together a three-dimensional view of the inside of Mars," Banerdt said.

The heat probe will use a motor and spring-driven hammer mechanism to pound its way down into the martian soil trailing a cable with sensitive temperature sensors. Pausing along the way to measure the thermal conductivity of the soil at different points, the probe could reach a maximum depth of about 15 feet.

The sensors on the trailing cable will measure slight differences in temperature between the surface and the probe's maximum depth, allowing scientists to extrapolate temperatures all the way to the core 2,000 miles below.

InSight's third investigation relies on the lander's radio system. By carefully analyzing slight changes in the radio signals from the spacecraft as Mars rotates on its axis and sweeps along its orbit, scientists can precisely locate the martian polar axis and measure how it slowly changes orientation.

"Over the course of a year, we can watch that north pole wobble just a little bit because of the core sloshing around inside the planet," Banerdt said. "And that will give us a very, very tight constraint on the size of that core, its density and so its composition."

"That tells us the structure of Mars, the structure of Mars tells us something about the processes that put that structure together, we can put that into our models, extrapolate to the Earth and understand how the Earth formed four and a half billion years ago. And that's really the crux of the science behind this mission." </s> And you thought finding a parking place could be difficult.

To reach its reserved spot on Mars, NASA’s InSight lander on Monday must hit a precise spot in the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere, survive a searing plunge to the surface involving a supersonic parachute and touch down softly on a tripod of legs.

Mission managers at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are feeling a mix of excitement and nerves about the process formally called Entry, Descent and Landing, or EDL, but informally known as “seven minutes of terror.”

“Everything that we’ve done to date makes us feel comfortable and confident we’re going to land on Mars,” said Tom Hoffman, the mission’s project manager at JPL. “But everything has to go perfectly, and Mars could always throw us a curveball.”

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NASA's InSight mission, on track for a Nov. 26 touchdown on Mars, will look for tectonic activity and meteorite impacts on the Red Planet, study how much heat is still flowing through the planet, and track the planet’s wobble as it orbits the sun. This helps answer key questions about how the rocky planets of the solar system formed.

Less than half of the missions ever launched to Mars have made it to their destination.

NASA’s $814 million InSight mission, which plans to study Mars’ deep interior, will take its turn six years after the Curiosity rover and nearly seven months after a May 5 blastoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on an Atlas V rocket.

Around 2:40 p.m. EST Monday, the probe will pivot its heat shield to face Mars and separate from a cruise stage that on Sunday briefly fired an engine one last time — equivalent to a “breath of air,” Hoffman said — to line up the landing zone.

The target: Elysium Planitia, or a “heavenly plain” near Mars’ equator that Hoffman hopes offers “a really flat-looking area, much like a giant Walmart parking lot.”

NASA's InSight mission, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is designed to give the Red Planet its first thorough check up since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. The mission launched May 5 from California and is set to land on Mars on Monday, Nov. 26.

Minutes later, the spacecraft will hit the upper atmosphere at 12,300 mph, needing to slow down to 5 mph, or else risk creating a new crater on the Martian surface.

Landing on Mars is a particularly difficult challenge, NASA says, because its gravitational pull combined with a very thin atmosphere, about 1 percent of Earth’s, makes slowing down hard.

InSight’s heat shield will feel temperatures approaching 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to melt steel — during its descent.

If all goes well, after slowing to about 850 mph, at roughly seven miles above the surface, the spacecraft will pop out a supersonic parachute for more braking power, then drop its heat shield, deploy three landing legs and begin scanning the surface with radar pulses.

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After shedding a backshell and a brief free-fall, InSight will fire a dozen retro-rockets to soften the 789-pound lander’s touchdown in a cloud of red dust around 2:47 p.m.

Back on Earth, white-knuckled engineers at JPL will await word of the lander’s fate.

Within about eight minutes, the time radio signals will take to traverse the 91 million miles to Earth, they hope to hear a beep signifying that the lander is safe.

“I’m going to be very excited once we get that first signal back that shows we’ve successfully landed on Mars,” said Hoffman.

Teams may get more information from a pair of tiny “stalkers” that launched with the lander.

NASA's Insight mission is targeting a touchdown on Elysium Planitia, a flat-smooth plain just north of the equator that makes for the perfect location from which to study the deep Martian interior.

Two experimental NASA spacecraft known as CubeSats, each about the size of a briefcase, are the first of their kind to travel in deep space. Engineers hope they'll be able to relay news about the lander’s descent and health as they fly by the Red Planet roughly 3,000 miles behind InSight.

Otherwise, mission teams will have to be patient. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will fly overhead and transmit the data about three hours after landing. Confirmation that power-generating solar arrays have unfurled will take closer to six hours.

InSIght — short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — then will begin a months-long process of robotically placing science several instruments on the surface of Mars, chief among them a seismometer provided by France.

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That will begin a minimum two-year study of the layers making up the planet’s, crust, mantle and core, measuring “marsquakes” to create a 3-D picture of Mars’ interior.

Scientists expect that knowledge to advance understanding about the evolution of planets, including Earth and planets orbiting other stars.

“There’s a lot of things that can go wrong,” Bruce Banerdt, the mission’s lead scientist from JPL, said Sunday. “I’m actually really confident, personally, that we’re going to land safely (Monday). Doesn’t mean I’m not nervous.”
NASA's InSight Mars lander launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base near Lompoc, California. It is the first interplanetary mission launched from the West Coast of the United States.