Digging deep: New Mars mission to take first look at what’s
going on deep inside the Red Planet 21 Aug 2012 A UK Space
Agency-funded instrument, designed to investigate the interior
structure and processes of Mars, has been selected to travel to
the Red Planet on NASA’s newly announced InSight mission. (JPG,
6.9 Mb) Artist rendition of the formation of rocky bodies in the
solar system. The new mission, set to launch in 2016, will take
the first look into the deep interior of Mars to investigate
why, as one of our solar system’s rocky planets, the Red Planet
evolved so differently from Earth. The UK-funded SEIS-SP is a
Seismometer that will listen for "marsquakes" and use this
information to map the boundaries between the rock layers inside
Earth's neighbour. This will help determine if the planet has a
liquid or solid core, and provide some clues as to why its
surface is not divided up into tectonic plates as on Earth.
Detailed knowledge of the interior of Mars in comparison to
Earth will help scientists unde