Nasa’s Mars Curiosity rover is going to get some company. The US space agency on Monday selected a small Mars lander for a hotly contested small planetary science mission to launch in 2016. The point of the mission is to help figure out how Mars formed, information that scientists say will give them insight into how rocky bodies like the earth were created.
Unlike Curiosity, a car-sized surface rover that landed on August 6 to search for habitats where microbial life could thrive on Mars, the new probe will be focused on what is happening deep in the planet’s core.
The solar-powered lander, called InSight, will include a French-built seismometer to determine if Mars has “Marsquakes” and a thermometer to measure how much heat is coming from the planet’s core, officials said.