Night owl? Good news — there’s an historic rocket launch early tomorrow morning that you can catch while the rest of the country is sleeping. NASA’s InSight Mars lander is scheduled for takeoff at 4:05 AM Pacific, weather permitting.
View More Get up super early and watch NASA’s InSight Mars lander launch liveCategory: Mars Lander
NASA’s InSight Mars lander will gaze (and drill) into the depths of the Red Planet
NASA’s latest mission to Mars, Insight, is set to launch early Saturday morning in pursuit of a number of historic firsts in space travel and planetology. The lander’s instruments will probe the surface of the planet and monitor its seismic activity with unprecedented precision, while a pair of diminutive cubesats riding shotgun will test the viability of tiny spacecraft for interplanetary travel.
View More NASA’s InSight Mars lander will gaze (and drill) into the depths of the Red PlanetTiny satellites named Wall-E and Eva are about to take a trip to Mars. Will they survive?
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Two tiny NASA satellites nicknamed Wall-E and Eva are about to hitch a ride to Mars.
The twin, suitcase-sized spacecraft, called cubesats, will launch to space Saturday aboard the same rocket carrying NASA’s InSight lander to Mars, but they’ll have very different missions once they reach the red planet in November.
While InSight is expected to unlock the secrets of the planet’s interior from the ground, the cubesats — collectively named MarCO, short for Mars Cube One — will stay in orbit around Mars to test out if these little spacecraft can relay information from the lander back to Earth. Read more…
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View More Tiny satellites named Wall-E and Eva are about to take a trip to Mars. Will they survive?NASA’s next Mars mission launches Saturday: Everything you need to know
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On Saturday, NASA will launch its next mission to Mars. This time the lander, known as InSight, is focused squarely on learning more about the inner-workings of the red planet.
The space agency’s InSight lander is expected to take about seven months between launch and — if all goes well — landing on the planet in November to gather all the data it can about the Martian geology around it and below it.
While the mission probably won’t directly help humans get to Mars in the coming decades, the science InSight is tasked with is still pretty amazing. Read more…
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View More NASA’s next Mars mission launches Saturday: Everything you need to know