page_title: InSight
section_title: Objectives
hierarchical_section_title: InSight / Objectives
caption_attribution_description: English: PIA22745: InSight - Artist's Illustration https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA22745 This artist's illustration depicts NASA's InSight lander on Mars. InSight, 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 will look for tectonic activity and meteorite impacts, study how much heat is still flowing through the planet, and track Mars' wobble as it orbits the sun. While InSight is a Mars mission, it's more than a Mars mission. InSight will help answer key questions about the formation of the rocky planets of the solar system. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the InSight Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space, Denver, Colorado built the spacecraft. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, which is managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. For more information about the mission, go to https://mars.nasa.gov/insight.
context_page_description: The Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport mission is a robotic lander designed to study the deep interior of the planet Mars. It was manufactured by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and most of its scientific instruments were built by European agencies. The mission launched on 5 May 2018 at 11:05 UTC aboard an Atlas V-401 rocket and successfully landed at Elysium Planitia on Mars on 26 November 2018 at 19:52:59 UTC. InSight traveled 483 million km during its journey.
  InSight's objectives are to place a seismometer, called SEIS, on the surface of Mars to measure seismic activity and provide accurate 3D models of the planet's interior; and measure internal heat flow using a heat probe called HP³ to study Mars' early geological evolution. This could bring a new understanding of how the Solar System's terrestrial planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars – and Earth's Moon form and evolve.
  The lander was originally planned for launch in March 2016. An instrument problem delayed the launch beyond the 2016 launch window.
context_section_description: The InSight mission placed a single stationary lander on Mars to study its deep interior and address a fundamental issue of planetary and Solar System science: understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner Solar System (including Earth) more than four billion years ago.
  InSight's primary objective is to study the earliest evolutionary processes that shaped Mars. By studying the size, thickness, density and overall structure of Mars' core, mantle and crust, as well as the rate at which heat escapes from the planet's interior, InSight will provide a glimpse into the evolutionary processes of all of the rocky planets in the inner Solar System. The rocky inner planets share a common ancestry that begins accretion. As the body increases in size, its interior heats up and evolves to become a terrestrial planet, containing a core, mantle and crust. Despite this common ancestry, each of the terrestrial planets is later shaped and molded through the poorly understood process of differentiation. InSight mission's goal is to improve the understanding of this process and, by extension, terrestrial evolution, by measuring the planetary building blocks shaped by this differentiation: a terrestrial planet's core, mantle and crust.
  The mission will determine if there is any seismic activity, measure the rate of heat flow from the interior, estimate the size of Mars' core and whether the core is liquid or solid. This data would be the first of its kind for Mars. It is also expected that frequent meteor airbursts (10–200 detectable events per year for InSight) will provide additional seismo-acoustic signals to probe the interior of Mars. The mission's secondary objective is to conduct an in-depth study of geophysics, tectonic activity and the effect of meteorite impacts on Mars, which could provide knowledge about such processes on Earth. Measurements of crust thickness, mantle viscosity, core radius and density, and seismic activity should result in a three- to tenfold increase in accuracy compared to current data. This is the first time a robotic lander dug this deep into the martian crust.
  In terms of fundamental processes shaping planetary formation, it is thought that Mars contains the most in-depth and accurate historical record, because it is big enough to have undergone the earliest accretion and internal heating processes that shaped the terrestrial planets, but is small enough to have retained signs of those processes. The science phase is expected to last for two years.
caption: InSight lander on Mars (artist concept)
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