insight isn't just a Mars mission it's really a mission to the terrestrial
planet interiors so Mars is kind of the Goldilocks planets it's not too big it's
not too small it's just right if it was too big it would have retained a lot of
activity and erased all the the evidence that we're looking for if it was too
small it never would have undergone the same processes that form the earth and
so it's really just right Mars will give us this insight into early planet
formation and early planetary processes understanding the the details of the
structure of the interior of Mars will allow us to address questions of
planetary formation that we've only had been able to guess at before we are
missing cold hard data and this is what this mission will provide the insight
mission is a geophysical mission to Mars it's going to go to Mars and take its
vital signs it's kind of take its heartbeat the seismic activity of the
planet so we're gonna be doing that using a seismometer a very high
precision seismometer using techniques that have been well developed on earth
to get the understanding of the crust mantle and core and sort of the
relationship between those gonna take its temperature by measuring the thermal
gradient of the surface which tells how much heat is coming out and we also have
a heat flow probe we call it HP cubed and what that does is gonna basically
take the temperature of Mars and from that it will be able to understand what
the thermal flux is over the course of a full Martian year and it's going to sort
of measure its reflexes by looking at how the rotation wobbles with the tiles
effects of the Sun our final experiment is called rise and that's going to be
looking at the basically the wobble of Mars to help understand what the core
size may be in composition the Lockheed Martin flight system our role is to
build the aeroshell the crew stage and the lander all three of those have
extremely high heritage from Phoenix 50 meters standing back for touchdown
it's an advantage for us to use heritage designs because we're familiar with them
we've tested them we've qualified them they worked successfully on the surface
of Mars we have a really big head start a lot of things have come together and
make it possible to learn you know a great deal about the interior Mars from
a seismometer so we have Knesset that's building our seismometer that's been
under development for many many years what it does is it just sits on the
surface of Mars and it's like a stethoscope it listens to what's going
on inside Mars on the HP cubed instrument we've have that being
delivered to us from DLR that also has been under development for many years
and what this probe does is it penetrates into the subsurface up to
five meters on its way it measures the thermal conductivity a basic mantra of
our of our flight system design is low-risk and with that as low cost risk
we've been to Mars before with the JPL Lockheed Martin team we've been to the
surface of Mars before successfully with Phoenix we know how to operate the arm
the surface operations are much much simpler than Phoenix and we're putting
two instruments on the surface and then we're leaving them there was no ground
in the loop interaction repetitive weekly uplink downlink sessions were
just made to do this mission the heritage for insight extends way past
just the flight system and the hardware it extends to the personnel the
processes the tools that we've developed and so forth with one spacecraft with on
a discovery budget we're really going to be able to do the science that for the
last 20 years we thought would cost at least a billion to a billion and a half
dollars and require three or four spacecraft we have very robust margins
built into inside 50% margin on our instrument deployment
timeline we have 50% margin on our science data collection there's 500
percent margin on our daily data volume we're we're in good shape well I think
this missions going to generate a lot of excitement we're already connecting to
the public through Twitter Facebook and on the web we're going to be working
with educators to put Mars quake data in the hands of the kids to actually work
with it as part of their earth science curriculum and get an angle on planetary
science at the same time we've got the right expertise and knowledge to run
this mission we're going to be ready for launch in 2016
within six months we'll be landing on the planet and immediately bring you
back our science it's going to be a great mission
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