(Music)
Bruce Banerdt: InSight isn't just a Mars mission, it's really a mission to the terrestrial planet interior.
Mars is kinda the Goldilocks planet. 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 evidence
that we're looking for.
If it was too small it never would have undergone the same processes that formed the Earth,
and so it's really just right.
Susanne Smrekar: Mars will give us this insight into early planet formation
and early planetary processes.
Banerdt: Understanding 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.
Smrekar: We are missing cold, hard data, and this is what this mission will provide.
Banerdt: The InSight mission is a geophysical mission to Mars.
It's going to go to Mars and take it's vital signs. It's gonna take it's hearbeat,
the seismic activity of the planet.
Tom Hoffman: So we're going to 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.
Banerdt: It's going to take it's temperature by measuring the thermal gradient of the surface
which tells how much heat is coming out.
Hoffman: We also have a heat flow probe. We call it HP Cubed.
And what that does is going to 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.
Banerdt: And it's going to sort of measure it's reflexes by looking at how the rotation wobbles
with the tiled effects of the sun.
Hoffman: Our final experiment is called Rise.
and that's going to be looking at basically the wobble of Mars
to help understand what the core size may be and the composition.
Stu Spath: The Lockheed Martin flight system, our role is to build the aeroshell,
the cruise stage and the lander.
All three of those have extremely high heritage from Phoenix.
Announcer: 80 meters, 50 meters, standing by for touchdown. Touchdown signal detected. (Cheers)
Stacy Weinstein-Weiss: 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've worked successfully on the surface of Mars.
We have a really big head start.
Smrekar: A lot of things have come together to make it possible to learn, you know, a great deal
about the interior of Mars from a seismometer.
Hoffman: So we have CNES that's building our seismometer that's been under development for many, many years.
Ken Hurst: 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.
Hoffman: On the HP Cubed instrument, we've have that being delivered to us from DLR.
That also has been under development for many years.
Troy Hudson: And what this probe does is it penetrates into the subsurface,
up to five meters. On it's way, it measures the thermal conductivity.
Spath: A basic mantra of our flight system design is low risk,
and with that is low cost risk.
Weinstein-Weiss: 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
with no ground in the loop interaction; repetitive, weekly up link - down link sessions.
We are just made to do this mission.
Spath: 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.
Smrekar: With one spacecraft 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.
Weinstein-Weiss: And we have very robust margins built in to Insight;
A 50 percent margin on our instrument deployment timeline.
We have 50 percent margin on our science data collection.
We have 500 percent margin on our daily data volume.
We're in good shape.
Smrekar: Well, I think this mission is 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.
Spath: We've got the right expertise and knowledge to run this mission.
Weinstein-Weiss: We're going to be ready for launch in 2016.
Smrekar: Within six months we'll be landing on the planet and immediately bringing back our science.
Weinstein-Weiss: It's going to be a great mission.