Successful start to the InSight Mars mission

On 5 May 2018, the NASA rocket carrying the InSight lander lifted off successfully. After initially heading south from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, after around 90 minutes the InSight separated from the launch vehicle and headed off on its trajectory to Mars. After a voyage lasting a good six months and covering 485 million kilometres, the lander is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet on 26 November 2018. InSight will be the first mission to take a look deep below the surface of Mars to study the planet's interior by measuring the planet's heat loss and recording marsquakes.

The InSight Lander will place a seismometer, dubbed SEIS (standing for Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure), on the surface of Mars. As soon as data gathered by SEIS arrive at ETH Zurich, seismologists from the Swiss Seismological Service (SED) and the Seismology and Geodynamics Group (SEG) will analyse them as part of their routine work. However, with just one seismometer in place, this will be no easy task. Unlike on Earth, where seismologists can rely on very many recording stations to precisely determine the origin of a tremor, on Mars there will be no addtional reference points. For this reason, special care will be taken to extract as much information as possible from even the weakest signals indicating possible marsquakes, meteorite impacts or even minor tornadoes. For this purpose, staff at the Marsquake Service will combine methods taken from the early days of seismology, when there were only a few seismometers on Earth, with modern analytic methods for locating seismic events.

It is hoped that the results of the InSight mission will provide insights into one of the fundamental questions of planetary and solar system research, giving us a better understanding of the processes that created the Earth-like planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than 4 billion years ago.

Learn more about the InSight mission and related acitivites at ETH www.insight.ethz.ch

See what our Mars scientists are telling about the @NASAInSight mission

Watch the launch