Watch Live: InSight Mission To Mars To Make History Saturday

LOS ANGELES, CA — Move over Florida. Get ready Mars. NASA and Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory are aiming for Saturday for the West Coast's first interplanetary launch: a mission to study the center of Mars for the first time ever. Both the West Coast launch and the effort to study the red planet's center are historic firsts.

The mission is also be the first since the Apollo moon landings that NASA will attempt place a seismometer on the soil of another planet or moon. The 301-million-mile trip to Mars is expected to take nearly seven months.

The window for NASA scientists to launch the InSight mission Saturday is 4:05 a.m. California time, 7:05 a.m. Eastern. The launch is expected to create a light show from the launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County to Santa Maria in San Diego.

Click here to see the launch live.

"Depending on where you are in Southern California you'll be able to see the space craft at various points along its ascent as it heads off on its way to Mars," Tom Hoffman, a project manager with NASA, said at a March news conference at JPL. "This should be spectacular because it will be early morning hours so it should light up the sky and be very visible throughout all of Southern California and into Mexico."

Scientists have been able to snap pictures of Mars before and study its rocks and dust, but they've just scratched the surface Insight's principal investigator William "Bruce" Banerdt told NPR.

"Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of this planet has never been observed before," Banerdt says. "And we're going to go and observe it with our seismometer and with our heat flow probe for the very first time."

The heat flow probe is used to take the planet's temperature while InSight's seismometer will measure "Marsquakes," according to NPR.

"In essence it will take the vital signs of Mars -- pulse, temperature and much more. We like to say that it is the first thorough checkup since the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago," said Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate.

The InSight probe, a stationary lander, will be blasted toward the Red Planet by a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. ULA is a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

The launch window for the mission stretches into June 8, in case weather or technical issues force delays in Saturday's planned takeoff. Regardless of when the rocket actually launches, InSight is scheduled to land on Mars on Nov. 26.

City News Service contributed to this report. Image: InSight lander rendering courtesy of NASA