The landing site for the InSight mission in Elysium Planitia
The landing site for the InSight mission in Elysium Planitia
For the InSight mission, a landing area was sought that had to meet several scientific criteria, but above all space systems engineering criteria. For a secure energy supply from solar power and to avoid extreme diurnal and seasonal temperature variations, it could not be too far north or south of the equator, it had to be flat and, as far as possible, not covered by rocks. After a long selection process, engineers and scientists selected an area in a plain southwest of the large volcanic complex surrounding Elysium Mons. The chosen site is in Elysium Planitia, north of the Martian equator and the highland border – just a few hundred kilometres north of Gale Crater (below the ‘4’ in the latitude label), in which the NASA rover Curiosity has been driving since 2012. The image is a section of a global topographic map of Mars; blue and green are low-lying areas, yellow and red are elevated terrain. The image is about 5000 kilometres wide.
