NASA to launch new mission to Mars to probe below the crust (+video)

In 2016, NASA's Mars rover Curiosity will get a companion – a new lander that aims to help scientists figure out how the planet formed and evolved, from core to crust.

In doing so, the project could shed additional light on how a planet that could have been hospitable to life early in its history became so hostile to it today, at least on the surface.

NASA officials announced the mission during a briefing late Monday afternoon. Known as InSight, the lander aims to use a seismometer to determine the size, makeup, and current condition of the planet's core, develop a profile of the planet's crust, analyze its mantle, measure the planet's marsquake activity, and measure the rate at which meteors are striking the planet's surface. In addition, the lander will sink a probe several meters into the soil to help estimate how the planet's temperature varies with depth.

As for habitability, on a planetary scale what goes on under the crust can be just as important as what goes on at the surface, astrobiologists note.

Global magnetic fields – which Mars no longer has – can deflect cosmic rays and charged particles from solar storms, which can threaten organisms on the surface. Earth's magnetic field results from the motions of an electrically conductive molten-iron outer core. On Mars, this dynamo has shut down.

On Earth, heat from the core also drives plate tectonics – a planetary heat-exchanger in which the crust is constantly recycled between taffy-like material in the mantle and solid surface. Tectonics triggers volcanism, whose gases can play an enormous role in readjusting the composition of a planet's atmosphere – including the amount of water vapor – and hence its climate.

Does Mars have active tectonics today? "We just don't know," says John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for the agency's science-mission directorate.

This mission falls under the agency's Discovery program, which focuses on relatively low-cost missions whose hardware costs are capped at $425 million. Curiosity, by contrast, is part of the NASA's Mars Exploration Program. And the cost of its mission is estimated at $2.5 billion.

Despite it's relatively low cost, InSight aims to answer questions planetary scientists have been asking about the Red Planet for decades, Dr. Grunsfeld explained during the briefing.

"We're very confident that this will produce exciting science," Grunsfeld said.

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