Lecture
The InSight Mission: Journey to the Center of Mars
When:
December 3 & 4Where:
Pasadena (see description for full details, including how to watch online)Target Audience:
General publicOverview:
The InSight mission to Mars, the twelfth mission in NASA's Discovery
Program, will launch in March of 2016, landing six months later in
Elysium Planitia. Unlike previous missions to Mars, which have focused
on surface features and chemistry, InSight aims to explore the interior
of the planet down to its very core. InSight will investigate the
fundamental processes of terrestrial planet formation and evolution by
performing the first comprehensive surface-based geophysical
measurements on Mars. It will provide key information on the composition
and structure of an Earth-like planet that has gone through most of the
evolutionary stages of the Earth up to plate tectonics.
The planet Mars is a keystone in our quest for understanding the early
processes of terrestrial planet formation and evolution. Unlike the
Earth, its overall structure appears to be relatively unchanged since a
few hundred million years after formation. Unlike the Moon, it is large
enough that the pressure-temperature conditions within the planet span
an appreciable fraction of the terrestrial planet range. Thus the
large-scale chemical and structural evidence within Mars should tell us a
great deal about the processes of planetary differentiation and heat
transport.
InSight will pursue these goals using seismology, precision tracking,
and heat flow measurements. The limitation to a single location provides
challenges to traditional seismology, which can be overcome with the
application of single-station techniques that have been developed for
terrestrial observations, and to heat flow interpretation, which is
spatially variable and thus would prefer many distributed measurements.
Speaker:
Dr. Bruce Banderdt, InSight Principal Investigator, JPL
Location:
Thursday, Dec. 3
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory von Kármán Auditorium, Pasadena, California
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Friday, Dec. 4
The Vosloh Forum at Pasadena City College
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Webcast:
Click here to watch the event live on Ustream