A robotic geologist armed with a hammer and quake monitor is rocketing towards Mars, aiming to land on the red planet and explore its mysterious insides.
In a twist, NASA launched the Mars InSight lander on Saturday from California rather than Florida's Cape Canaveral. It was the first interplanetary mission ever to depart from the West Coast, drawing pre-dawn crowds to Vandenberg Air Force Base and rocket watchers down the California coast into Baja.
The spacecraft will take more than six months to get to Mars and start its unprecedented geologic excavations, travelling 300 million miles (485 million kilometres) to get there.
InSight will dig deeper into Mars than ever before - nearly 16 feet, or five metres - to take the planet's temperature. It will also attempt to make the first measurements of marsquakes, using a high-tech seismometer placed directly on the Martian surface.
Also aboard the Atlas V rocket: a pair of mini satellites, or CubeSats, meant to trail InSight all the way to Mars in a first-of-its-kind technology demonstration.
The $1 billion mission involves scientists from the US, France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe.
"I can't describe to you in words how very excited I am ... to go off to Mars," said project manager Tom Hoffman from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "It's going to be awesome."
NASA hasn't put a spacecraft down on Mars since the Curiosity rover in 2012. The US is the only country to successfully land and operate a spacecraft at Mars. Only about 40 per cent of all missions to Mars from all countries - orbiters and landers alike - have proven successful over the decades.
If all goes well, the three-legged InSight will descend by parachute and engine firings onto a flat equatorial region of Mars - believed to be free of big, potentially dangerous rocks - on November 26. Once down, it will stay put, using a mechanical arm to place the science instruments on the surface.
"This mission will probe the interior of another terrestrial planet, giving us an idea of the size of the core, the mantle, the crust and our ability then to compare that with the Earth," said NASA's chief scientist Jim Green.
"This is of fundamental importance to understand the origin of our solar system and how it became the way it is today."
Share
