What Is Going On Deep Within Mars?

The Red Planet has been an object of intrigue for centuries, and an armada of orbiters and rovers have explored Mars up close. Yet for all our exploration efforts there remains a perplexing mystery: just what is going on deep within Mars?

Previous missions to Mars have been biased towards what’s happening on the surface. That’s no surprise given the menu of marvels on offer, such as sweeping sand dunes, soaring volcanoes and scintillating blue sunsets. We now know Mars’s outer facade so well that we have a better map of the Martian surface than we do of the ocean floor here on Earth. Yet it’s the deepest layers of a planet that really make it tick, and relatively little is known about the Red Planet’s interior. Now, that’s all about to change thanks to a mission that has been long in the planning. “It was first proposed 25 years ago,” says Dr Suzanne Smrekar from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. “We’re excited to finally be doing this.” Smrekar is the deputy principal investigator for the InSight mission. It was launched in May aboard an Atlas V-401 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and is currently en route to the Red Planet. Due to touchdown on Mars on 26 November, close to NASA’s existing Curiosity rover, it will spend a minimum of one Martian year (nearly two Earth years) surveying deep beneath the famously ruddy dirt.