Article Posted on : - Aug 21, 2012

An artist's rendition of the proposed InSight (Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) lander. A NASA/JPL-Caltech photo

WASHINGTON (BNS): Even as the Curiosity rover has landed on Mars on a mission to hunt for signs of life there, US space agency NASA has decided to send another low-cost robotic lander to the Red Planet to look "deep" into its interior and find out why the planet has evolved so differently from our Earth as one of the Solar System's rocky planets.

The new mission, called 'InSight', will be launched in 2016 and is scheduled to land on Mars in September that year. It will carry four instruments - two by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one each by the French and German space agencies.

The InSight will place instruments on the Martian surface to find out whether the core of the planet is solid or liquid like Earth's and why Mars' crust is not divided into tectonic plates that drift like Earth's.

NASA selected the InSight mission as part of its Discovery-class programme which sponsors frequent, cost-capped Solar System exploration missions with highly focused scientific goals.

The two-year Martian mission was chosen over two other missions - a mission to a comet and another to Saturn's moon Titan.

The cost of the mission, excluding the launch vehicle and related services, is capped at $425 million in 2010 dollars, NASA said.

"The exploration of Mars is a top priority for NASA, and the selection of InSight ensures we will continue to unlock the mysteries of the Red Planet and lay the groundwork for a future human mission there," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said.

"The recent successful landing of the Curiosity rover has galvanized public interest in space exploration and today's announcement makes clear there are more exciting Mars missions to come," he said.

Earlier this month, the space agency's biggest and most sophisticated robotic explorer Curiosity, built at a cost of 2.5-billion-dollar, successfully landed on the Red Planet to begin a two-year journey to search for signs of life that ever existed on the nearby planet.