The InSight Mission will look at Mars’s seismic¹ activity and latent heat to find out more about how planets get made--and how humans might live there.

InSight任务目的在于研究火星的地震活动和潜热，以了解更多关于火星的形成过程以及在未来人类如何能在那里生活。

“Absolutely spectacular mission…and it’s not a rover, it’s a lander. It’s designed to land and deploy² several instruments.”

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“这是一项绝对壮观的任务，并且这次任务并不是在火星上空的漫游，而是实实在在的着陆，并部署相关仪器。”

Jim Green, NASA’s new chief scientist, talking about the InSight Mission to Mars. InSight [Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations³, Geodesy and Heat Transport] launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California the morning of May 5th. He spoke⁴ with Scientific American space editor Lee Billings, who recorded their conversation.

NASA的新首席科学家Jim Green谈到火星InSight任务时说。5月5日上午，Insight在加州范登堡空军基地发射，以期能够通过对地震探测、测地学和热传导对火星进行深入的内部探索。事后科学美国空间编辑李比林斯采访了Jim Green，并记录了相关内容。

“One instrument…will be set on the surface and will measure Marsquakes. Now why are Marsquakes important? Well, Marsquakes, because we can get the acoustic⁵ signals and see how they are displayed in time, we can tease out the size of the core, even if it’s liquid or not, the size of the mantle⁶ and the crust, and compare those with the big terrestrial planet, Earth, that we know a lot about its interior. And this will really help us understand how terrestrial planets are made.”

“我们会在火星表面设置一种仪器，并对火星进行测量。”为什么火星震动测量很重要？因为我们可以通过火星震动测量相应的声信号，并观察这些声信号是如何随着时间的推移而排布，进而估算出火星内核的大小，甚至推测出其内核是液体还是其他什么，同时大致估算出地幔和地壳的大小，这样我们就可以知道更多关于它的内部结构，从而真正的帮助我们理解类地行星是如何形成的。”

Green was NASA’s Planetary Science Division director since 2006 before taking on his current assignment just last week. Back to the InSight Mission.

从2006年开始Green一致担任NASA的行星科学部主任，直到在上周承担目前Insight任务。

“But in general, it also has a human exploration part to it. For instance, we know Mars is quaking, we have seen with Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, from orbit, avalanches⁷. And so, something is going on and it’s shaking the planet. And this is really exciting, because if humans go to Mars in our lifetime, which I anticipate they will, they’re gonna need to build structures. Those structures have got to be able to understand the environment and be safe. And so they’re gonna have to withstand whatever Marsquake environment is actually there. We will know what that is, we will know if it’s difficult or whether it’s relatively⁸ easy, but we’ll be able to accommodate it no matter what.

“但总的来说，它也有人类探索的部分。例如，我们知道火星在颤动，我们一直通过轨道、雪崩等观测火星侦察轨道器。所以，火星上正在发生的事在一直影响着这个星球。这真的很令人兴奋，因为如果有一天人类前往火星（我猜测是早晚的事），他们将需要构建相应的结构，这些结构必须能够适应环境并保持安全。所以他们必须承受住在那里的任何环境。通过观测我们可以直到要选用什么结构，工程建造是否困难或相对容易，但无论怎样我们都要适应这些环境。

“Now another experiment is a heat probe. This also sits on the surface and it pounds into the ground about five meters a set of thermistors that will measure the heat…and that will tell us how Mars is cooling off. You know, all our planets were built 4.5 billion years ago, they’re still cooling off from their initial accretion⁹. So we’re going to see, well, gee¹⁰, is like Earth’s geothermal ability, does Mars have an ability to, as it cools off, heat habitats for human exploration, or is it primarily very cool in the core, and we’ll know if it’s partially¹¹ liquid or not, is that completely solid now. And all that will be put together in our models of the interior of Mars and as I said, it will also have some profound effects on what we do with human explorations next.”

“现在另一个实验是热探测器。它坐落在火星表面，并向地面5米深的位置布置热敏电阻进行热量测量热…这将告诉我们火星如何冷却。我们所有的行星是建于45亿年前，它们仍然是基于他们最初聚积冷却。所以我们将会直到火星是否有类似地球的地热能力来冷却从而成为人类的栖息地，或者火星球核内部是否非常寒冷，以及内部是否是部分液体还是固态。所有这些都将被整合到我事先提到的火星内部模型中，它也会对我们下一步的人类探索产生深远的影响。”

If all goes well, InSight will land on Mars on November 26th.

如果一切顺利，InSight将于11月26日登陆火星。