Frazier Park, CA (Monday, Aug. 20, 2012 at 2 p.m.)—Ken Hurst of Piñon Pines was excited today to learn that the project he has been working on for nearly two years has been given the green light by NASA. In a national press conference today, NASA officials announced that the InSight seismological project, budgeted at about $425 million, is expected to be launching in April of 2016 for a landing in the equatorial belt of Mars about five months later.

InSight is being funded as part of the Discovery program. It will seek to learn about the formation, structure and evolution of Mars’ inner core, through temperature sensing and seismological measurements.

Hurst, a Ph.D. geologist employed at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is also a membr of the El Tejon Unified School District Board of Trustees. He and his father, Charles Hurst, a retired professor of engineering from Virginia Tech University, with his mother Nancy Hurst, helped create and sustain the Frazier Mountain High School Robotics Team.

See more in this week’s issue of The Mountain Enterprise.

This is part of the August 17, 2012 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.

Have an opinion on this matter? We'd like to hear from you.