NASA’s InSight Mars lander successfully launched this morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. As expected, the weather was quite a mess – very foggy – and once the Atlas V RD-180 engine ignited there wasn’t too much more than steam and an orange glow to be seen in the launch video.
Of course, the Atlas V launch vehicle isn’t going to be stopped by some ground level clouds – it, and the Centaur upper stage, performed flawlessly (keeping in line with the Atlas V’s virtually perfect flight record) putting InSight on course for Mars.
As I discussed earlier this morning, InSight is a probe intended to study the physical makeup of Mars itself to help us better understand the formation process of rocky worlds like Mars, Venus, and Earth. Mars is in an interesting spot in planetary formation – it’s big enough to have, of course, undergone many of the core processes in planetary formation, but is small enough to still likely show the evidence of these processes and how they happened.
Back to the launch, there isn’t much to see, but there is everything to think about – we have yet another Mars mission underway. That’s always awesome to me. A bonus is that this is the first NASA planetary mission to launch from the West Coast. Still don’t know the reason for this, but I’ll ask around.
Insight will reach mars on November 26th, 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InSight
Starting up I have a short, compiled video by NASA JPL covering the major events of the NASA InSight launch.
And here I have the full, proper stream – I do have part one cued up to T-30 seconds, but if you want to watch the full stream, just go back to the beginning of the video.