InSight Camera Calibration Target, Laser Retroreflector, and Microchip

A camera calibration target sits on the deck of the NASA's InSight lander, adorned with the flags of the countries participating in the mission.

The target, which will be viewed by InSight's cameras, provides a variety of colors and shapes to help calibrate the lander's cameras. It also shows off international flags representing the agencies, institutions and participating scientists of the mission as of late 2014 (since that time, Italy has contributed an experiment). In the second row are the United States flag and the logos of NASA, the French space agency CNES, which provided InSight's seismometer; and the German Aerospace Center DLR, which provided InSight's heat flow probe.

Below the target in the photo is an Italian experiment called the Laser Retroreflector for InSight (LaRRI). LaRRI is the small, copper-colored dome covered with circles just below the calibration target; it won't actually play a role in InSight's mission. The national space agency of Italy (ASI, for Agenzia Spaziale Italiana) provided LaRRI to be used by a possible future Mars orbiter mission with a laser altimeter making extremely precise measurements of the lander's location for fundamental physics studies and precision cartography.

A microchip bearing the names of nearly a million members of the public is visible in this image to the right of the calibration target. A second microchip with more than a million additional names was added after this photo was taken.

JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the InSight Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space, Denver, built the spacecraft. InSight is part of NASA s Discovery Program, which is managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

For more information about the mission, go to https://mars.nasa.gov/insight.