WASHINGTON, Oct. 25, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — NASA’s upcoming landing of the first-ever mission to study the heart of Mars will be the topic of a media briefing at 1:30 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Oct. 31 at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The briefing will air live on NASA Television, the agency’s website and the NASA InSight Facebook page.

NASA’s InSight Mars Lander (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) will land on the Red Planet at approximately 3 p.m. EST (noon PST) Monday, Nov. 26. InSight will study the deep interior of Mars to learn how all celestial bodies with rocky surfaces, including Earth and the Moon, formed. The lander’s instruments include a seismometer to detect marsquakes and a probe to monitor the flow of heat in the planet’s subsurface.

Briefing participants include:

• Lori Glaze, acting director of the Planetary Science Division, NASA Headquarters
• Bruce Banerdt, InSight principal investigator, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager at JPL
• Sue Smrekar, InSight deputy principal investigator at JPL
• Jaime Singer, InSight instrument deployment lead at JPL

Media not attending who would like to ask questions via phone during the event must provide their name and affiliation by noon EDT on Oct. 31, to JoAnna Wendel by email at joanna.r.wendel@nasa.gov.

The public can ask questions on Twitter using the hashtag #askNASA or by leaving a comment on the stream of the event on the NASA InSight Facebook page. 

For more information about InSight, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/insight

Follow the mission on Twitter at:

https://twitter.com/nasainsight

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SOURCE NASA