Dr Katarina Miljkovic only Australian working on NASA’s Mars Mission

Curtin University planetary scientist Dr Katarina Miljkovic will take part in NASA’s Mars InSight Mission to study the crust and interior of the Red Planet. Dr Miljkovic is the only Australian involved with the project. The InSight (Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) Mission will reveal what lies under the red planet’s surface so that we can understand the formation and evolution of Mars and other rocky planets in our inner solar system, such as Earth. The robotic lander is now Mars-bound, after a successful launch on May 5. It will be the first thorough check-up Mars has had since it formed 4.5 billion years ago and will measure vital signs such as its pulse (seismology), temperature (heat flow), and reflexes (radio science).

Red Planet Source: Pixabat Public Domain

Dr Miljkovic, an Early Career Research Fellow at Curtin University’s School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, said the stationary lander will measure seismic activity by waiting for a meteoroid to crash into the surface of Mars causing an earthquake — or more accurately, a “marsquake”.

“My role is to understand how small meteoroid bombardment occurs on Mars and what seismic effects it has on the Martian crust, by developing numerical models,” Dr Miljkovic said.

“InSight records the seismic quakes when impacts actually occur on Mars and my model helps us to understand the structure of the crust and core of Mars by constraining the properties associated with the impacts.”

This image shows the trail of NASA’s Mars InSight lander over the Los Angeles area after launching from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Central California on May 5, 2018. This is a stack of exposures taken from Mt. Wilson.

 

InSight was the first planetary mission to take off from the West Coast of the United States and launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.

It is expected to take about six months for the InSight lander to reach Mars where it will then spend about two years performing surface operations.