NASA is sending a mission to Mars this year. But don't get your space suit zipped up just yet: The trip is for a solar-powered lander, not people.
The NASA inspection kit is named InSight, and it's a hefty, 794-pound Martian lander. InSight (aka Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is set to blast off for Mars from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base before dawn, at around 4 a.m. Pacific on May 5, 2018.
Scientists at NASA say the lander will give the Red Planet a 4.5 billion year-overdue "checkup." InSight has three main objectives on Mars: taking the planet's temperature, measuring its size, and checking out how much it's shaking things up by monitoring for "Marsquakes."
Take a look at what the roughly $828 million mission will do:
The trip to Mars won't happen overnight. It takes about six months for the InSight lander to travel the roughly 301 million miles from southern California to Martian soil.
NASA says "the launch may be visible in California from Santa Maria to San Diego" if conditions are clear.
InSight will be hoisted aboard an Atlas V rocket along with a couple of tiny, toaster-sized cube satellites that will then fly off separately to Mars.
It will all weigh about 730,000 pounds when it's fully fueled and ready for blastoff.
Source: NASA
If everything goes according to plan, InSight will land on Mars on November 26, 2018.
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