Atlas 5 rocket soared into space early on Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying the first robotic NASA lander designed in precise to explore another planet on its journey to Mars.
InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is a Mars lander developed to study the "inner space" of Mars: its crust, mantle, and core.
The Mars InSight probe lifted off from the central California coast at 4:05 a.m. PDT, marking the first US interplanetary spacecraft to be launched over the Pacific.
Released about 90 minutes after launch on a 301 million-mile (484 million km) flight to Mars, it is due to reach its destination in six months, landing on a broad, smooth plain close to the planet’s equator called the Elysium Planitia, Reuters reported.
That will put InSight roughly 373 miles (600 km) from the 2012 landing site of the car-sized Mars rover Curiosity.
The new 360-kg spacecraft marks the 21st US-launched Martian exploration.
Up to 24 other Mars missions have been launched by other nations.
Once settled, the solar-powered InSight will spend two years exploring the depths of the planet’s interior for clues to how Mars took form and, by extension, the origins of the Earth and other rocky planets.
Scientists expect to see a dozen to 100 marsquakes over the course of the mission, producing data to help them deduce the depth, density and composition of the planet's core, the rocky mantle surrounding it and the outermost layer and the crust, according to Reuters.
InSight also will be fitted with a German-made drill to burrow as much as 5 meters underground, pulling behind it a rope-like thermal probe to measure heat flowing from inside the planet.
Aboard the same rocket that launches InSight will be a pair of miniature satellites called CubeSats, which will fly to Mars on their own paths behind the lander in a first deep-space test of that technology.
