{"id":2536,"date":"2012-05-04T07:30:40","date_gmt":"2012-05-04T14:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=2536"},"modified":"2012-05-03T22:45:29","modified_gmt":"2012-05-04T05:45:29","slug":"probing-the-interior-of-mars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=2536","title":{"rendered":"Probing the interior of Mars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Most of what we know about Mars only goes skin deep.  We&#8217;ve had several orbiters studying the planet with a variety of remote sensing instruments (cameras, lasers, radar, etc.) and several rovers running around on the surface.  The <a href=\"http:\/\/phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu\/index.php\">Phoenix lander<\/a> dug around in the soil a little.<\/p>\n<p>But so far, we haven&#8217;t been able to look beneath that skin.  No drills, no cores, no subsurface probes.  We haven&#8217;t even gotten a seismometer to the planet, which could be used to learn about the composition of the planet&#8217;s interior, and help answer the question of whether Mars still has a molten core.  (The Apollo astronauts put <a href=\"http:\/\/seismo.berkeley.edu\/blogs\/seismoblog.php\/2009\/07\/20\/quakes-on-the-moon\">seismometers on the Moon<\/a> to help answer similar questions.)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/insight.jpl.nasa.gov\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=floatRight width=200 src=\"http:\/\/insight.jpl.nasa.gov\/images\/home-content-image.png\"><\/a>The <a href=\"http:\/\/insight.jpl.nasa.gov\/\">InSight mission to Mars<\/a> seeks to change that.  InSight is a lander that will use a seismometer and a heat flow probe to learn about the planet&#8217;s interior.  (It will also have a surface camera, of course!)  The plan is for InSight to launch in early 2016 and land on Mars later that year.  <\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve studied Mars from the outside for decades now&#8230; it&#8217;s time to look under the hood!<\/p>\n<p>InSight is competing with two other concepts to be the next Discovery mission to Mars.  (The others are the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Titan_Mare_Explorer\">Titan Mare Explorer<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Comet_Hopper\">Comet Hopper<\/a>.)  One of the three will be selected in late 2012.  Stay tuned!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Most of what we know about Mars only goes skin deep. We&#8217;ve had several orbiters studying the planet with a variety of remote sensing instruments (cameras, lasers, radar, etc.) and several rovers running around on the surface. The Phoenix lander dug around in the soil a little. But so far, we haven&#8217;t been able to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2536"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2536"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2541,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2536\/revisions\/2541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}