NASA’s new lander will take a look inside Mars

NASA’s InSight lander will detect vibrations coming from inside Mars.

Everyone is talking about Mars lately. Elon Musk is very ambitious and wants to colonize it very soon. And thanks to satellites and rovers, we have a pretty good idea how the surface looks. And humans will most likely set foot there very soon, and we might get a decent HD live stream of it using lasers!

But before all of this, NASA wants to send InSight. It will launch in about a month, and once it reaches it’s destination, it will send back data about the interior makeup of the planet.

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InSight — which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, in case you were wondering — is equipped with sensitive seismometers that will detect vibrations from within Mars. These “marsquakes” are incredibly important to InSight’s research because it will help paint a picture of what lies beneath the surface.

“A seismometer is like a camera that takes an image of a planet’s interior,” Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and principal investigator of InSight explains. “It’s a bit like taking a CT scan of a planet.”

However, nobody knows what to exactly expect. Ultimately, the team hopes to be able to explain the layers that make up the planet and break them down in the same way that we understand the layers of Earth.