Posted May 05, 2018 23:50:42

Photo: The InSight lander will sit on the Martian surface and drill down 5 metres to take the planet's temperature. (AP/NASA)

A robotic geologist armed with a hammer and quake monitor rocketed toward Mars on Saturday, aiming to land on the red planet and explore its mysterious insides.

In a twist, NASA launched the Mars InSight lander from California to take advance of a shorter flight backlog, making it the first US interplanetary mission to launch from somewhere other than Florida's Cape Canaveral.

The launch drew pre-dawn crowds to Vandenberg Air Force Base and rocket watchers down the California coast into Baja.

The spacecraft will take more than six months to get to Mars and start its unprecedented geologic excavations, traveling 485 million kilometres to get there.

InSight (which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) will dig deeper into Mars than ever before — 5 metres — to take the planet's temperature.

It will also attempt to make the first measurements of marsquakes, using a high-tech seismometer placed directly on the Martian surface.

Measurements from the quakes will help scientists discover a range of things about Mars, including how thick the crust is and what the inside of Mars looks like.

Also aboard the Atlas V rocket are a pair of mini satellites, or CubeSats, meant to trail InSight all the way to Mars in a first-of-its-kind technology demonstration.

The two Mars Cube One CubeSats (MarCOs) are named WALL-E and EVE after the robotic central characters in the 2008 movie WALL-E.

Photo: The two MarCO satellites will fly behind InSight all the way to Mars. (AP/NASA)

The $1 billion mission involves scientists from the US, France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

"I can't describe to you in words how very excited I am … to go off to Mars," said project manager Tom Hoffman from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"It's going to be awesome."

NASA has not put a spacecraft down on Mars since the Curiosity rover in 2012.

NASA's Curiosity rover has already taught us a lot, but scientists say there's more to come.

The US is the only country to successfully land and operate a spacecraft at Mars. Only about 40 per cent of all missions to Mars from all countries — orbiters and landers alike — have proven successful over the decades.

If all goes well, the three-legged InSight will descend by parachute and rocket engines onto a flat equatorial region of Mars — believed to be free of big, potentially dangerous rocks — on November 26.

Once down, it will stay put, using a mechanical arm to place the scientific instruments on the surface.

"This mission will probe the interior of another terrestrial planet, giving us an idea of the size of the core, the mantle, the crust and our ability then to compare that with the Earth," said NASA's chief scientist Jim Green.

"This is of fundamental importance to understand the origin of our solar system and how it became the way it is today."

InSight's chief scientist, Bruce Banerdt of JPL, said Mars is ideal for learning how the rocky planets of our solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Unlike our active Earth, Mars has not been transformed by plate tectonics and other processes, he said.

Over the course of two Earth years — one Martian year — scientists expect InSight's three main experiments to provide a true 3D image of Mars.

The lander is equipped with a seismometer for measuring marsquakes, a self-hammering probe for burrowing beneath the surface, and a radio system for tracking the spacecraft's position and planet's wobbly rotation, thereby revealing the size and composition of Mars' core.

"InSight, for seismologists, will really be a piece of history, a new page of history," said the Paris Institute of Earth Physics' Philippe Lognonne, lead scientist of the InSight seismometer.

Problems with the French-supplied seismometer kept InSight from launching two years ago.

It was so foggy at Vandenberg that spectators there could hear and feel the roar and rumble of the rocket, but could not see it.

It was a marvellous sight, though, farther south. The rocket's bright orange flame was visible for some time as it arced upward across the dark sky west of greater Los Angeles.

NASA's new administrator Jim Bridenstine, who has been in the job for less than two weeks, observed the launch on monitors at space agency headquarters in Washington.

"I can't think of a better way to start my day!" Mr Bridenstine said via Twitter. "We're going to Mars!"

Photo: The launch was so shrouded in fog that spectators near the launch site could not see it. (AP/NASA: Bill Ingalls)

ABC/AP

Topics: space-exploration, spacecraft, united-states