Hello everyone,

As an astronautical engineering student from Turkey, I wanted to begin my steemit adventure with a space-related post.

Why Mars?

After the Earth, Mars is the most habitable planet in our solar system , and it is the closest one compared to other candidates. Altough Mars's is the closest possibly habitable planet, it is a great and difficult challenge to get there and land.

According to NASA these are the main reasons why they (and Elon Musk) believe Mars is habitable:

• Its soil contains water to extract
• It isn’t too cold or too hot
• There is enough sunlight to use solar panels
• Gravity on Mars is 38% that of our Earth's, which is believed by many to be sufficient for the human body to adapt to
• It has an atmosphere (albeit a thin one) that offers protection from cosmic and the Sun's radiation
• The day/night rhythm is very similar to ours here on Earth: a Mars day is 24 hours, 39 minutes and 35 seconds

InSight Mission

InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) is a NASA Discovery Program mission that will place a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep interior.

But InSight is more than a Mars mission - it is a terrestrial planet explorer that will address one of the most fundamental issues of planetary and solar system science - understanding the processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system (including Earth) more than four billion years ago.

By using sophisticated geophysical instruments, InSight will delve deep beneath the surface of Mars, detecting the fingerprints of the processes of terrestrial planet formation, as well as measuring the planet's "vital signs": Its "pulse" (seismology), "temperature" (heat flow probe), and "reflexes" (precision tracking).

InSight seeks to answer one of science's most fundamental questions: How did the terrestrial planets form?

Objectives

The InSight mission will seek to understand the evolutionary formation of rocky planets, including Earth, by investigating the interior structure and processes of Mars. InSight will also investigate the dynamics of Martian tectonic activity and meteorite impacts, which could offer clues about such phenomena on Earth.

Send your name to MARS

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, put the names onto this tiny 0.8 cm-square (8 mm-square) silicon wafer microchip using an electron beam to write extremely tiny letters with lines smaller than one one-thousandth the width of a human hair. The dime-size chip is affixed to the InSight lander deck and will remain on Mars forever.

You can fill out your "Mars boarding pass" here: https://mars.nasa.gov/participate/send-your-name/insight/

This is what you will get:
Hope you enjoy it!