August 27, 2018 9:21 pm

Tuesday, Discover More About the Mars InSight Mission with Natalie Starkey, Mo Welch, and Farah Alibay

On this week’s episode of StarTalk All-Stars we’re traveling back to the Red Planet. And, instead of looking for life we’re looking to understand how the planet functions as, well, a planet.

Cosmochemist and All-Stars host Natalie Starkey is back alongside co-host Mo Welch as they welcome Farah Alibay, Systems Engineer on the InSight mission and at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As a first-time guest, I can easily say that she crushed it. She gives such interesting information about the InSight mission as well as planetary exploration in general.

To start things off, you’ll hear a little bit about the launch of InSight and why launching on the West Coast comes with its own unique set of issues. We compare the Curiosity Rover to the InSight Lander (as you can tell by their descriptions they’re already a bit different) and discover why Curiosity might cause a bit of a headache for InSight when it relays information back to Earth.

Find out why the InSight team chose to land at Elysium Planitia – it’s the opposite reason of “because it’s exciting.” Farah explains how InSight will come down to the surface of Mars. You’ll also hear which scientific instruments InSight is bringing along with it to study the surface and core of Mars.

Then, we answer fan-submitted Cosmic Queries about the InSight mission and Martian exploration. You’ll learn about earthquakes and “marsquakes” and how the mechanisms to trigger these seismic events differ. Discover how the InSight mission saved money by using a 20-year-old part and why they were able to do it in the first place. Farah also tells us if the current giant dust storm on Mars is of any concern to her and her team. All that, plus, we discuss the CubeSats that are accompanying InSight on its mission, what challenges lie in rocket launches on Earth and on Mars, and if scientists will ever be satisfied enough to say that there isn’t life on Mars.

If you’re looking for more info about InSight before Tuesday’s podcast, check out Natalie’s blog post covering the launch of the InSight mission on May 5, 2018.

Please join us tomorrow night for InSight into Mars, with Natalie Starkey at 7pm ET right here on our website, as well as on our All-Stars channels on Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, Stitcher, and TuneIn. And if you’re an All-Access subscriber, you can watch or listen to this episode ad-free at 7pm, too.

That’s it for now. Keep Looking Up!
–Ian Mullen