NASA Seeks Most Boring Site on Mars for Future Mission

NASA is looking for the most boring sites on Mars for a future mission. Why? They're trying to find the safest potential landing site--and now they've narrowed the search down to four.

The future mission will launch in March 2016, which is when a lander will travel to the Red Planet to study the interior of the planet. Known as the Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight), the lander is stationary. It will touch down on the planet in August at one of the four landing sites before beginning its mission.

The newest candidate sites were selected from 22 original sites. All four of the semi-finalists are located near each other on an equatorial plain in an area of Mars called Elysium Panitia.

"We picked four sites that look safest," said geologist Matt Golombek, who's leading the site-selection process for InSight, in a news release. "They have mostly smooth terrain, few rocks and very little slope."

The mission itself will study how various processes formed and shaped Mars. This, in turn, will give scientists a better understanding of the evolution of the inner solar system's rocky planets, including Earth. Because of its mission, InSight needs a site that fulfills two basic engineering constraints. One is being close enough to the equator for the lander's solar array to have adequate power at all times during the year and the second is that the elevation needs to be low enough to have sufficient atmosphere above the site for a safe landing.

But that's not all InSight needs. The lander also requires penetrable ground so that it can deploy a heat-flow probe that will hammer itself 3 yards to 5 yards into the Martian surface in order to monitor heat coming from the planet's interior.

Currently, the scientists are continuing to evaluate the four finalist sites. Once they choose the final site, they'll begin to further prepare for this mission, which could lead to further understanding of how Mars and our own planet formed in our solar system.

Want to learn more about InSight? Check it out here.