But that is only a very very small piece of the planet, and often things that are you know, driving what the stuff that's driving what you see on the surface, a lot is on the inside. And we don't know much about the inside of Mars, for the main reason that we've never had an instrument. So there's a bunch of questions that we've had about, what, what's on the inside and Mark was like, What is it, what is the structure, you know, if you look at like a diagram the internal structure of the earth, you see things like a mantel, a core and outer core, across, stuff like that so you know we don't really we don't really know what the internal structure of Mars is.
And then there's the question of whether it's seismically active, so are there earthquakes or Mars quakes, I guess. And is there volcanic activity still or is it still a dead planet. And finally, you know, like what's the temperature of the inside of Mars and how is heat flowing to the outside, because that tells you sort of how it's cooling off, which kind of similar to asking is there volcanic activity. Because the more a planet cools off the less volcanic activity. So the reason we care about this is one, if we can understand, You know how Mars formed and if we can understand if we can have data on the insides of two terrestrial rocky planets so we understand the earth. Well, if we can get data about this on Mars too, then we can kind of understand how rocky planets are formed, so this is relevant to how the Earth was formed rolamento Venus was formed, irrelevant town Mercury is formed, and probably even some of the moons, but this is just an important question, both for studying the earth, and just planetology.
Also, I'm a big fan of the, the word Mars quake, which is part of why I want to do this talk. So here we are. Alright. So, Insight stands for interior exploration, using seismic investigations Geodesy and heat transport. So, essentially what it's doing is it's doing two big things. It's looking for earthquakes and tremors so that's the seismic investigations, and it's trying to measure you know the heat transport by you know getting an idea of what the internal temperature of Mars is. And both of those, you know, doing both of those things will tell us a lot about these two goals, which is understand the formation and evolution of Mars and its internal structure. And secondly, measure the seismic activity and figure out you know, how, how many are Mars quakes are there and stuff like that, what's going on in the inside of Mars.