On March 9th 2016, NASA announced that it will delay InSight, it's next Mars mission until 2018. InSight, which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport, was originally scheduled for a March 2016 launch. The mission was cancelled when a vacuum leak was discovered in the spacecraft's seismometer. The new launch window will allow for a May 5th 2018 launch, with a November 26th 2018 landing on Mars.
InSight's goal is to understand how rocky planets, like the Earth and others, were formed. The mission will send a lander to the Martian surface. That lander's prime science instrument or SEIS (Seismic Experiment for Interior Structures) was built with the cooperation of the Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the European Space Agency's PRODEX program, the Max Planck institute for Solar System Research, and Imperial College in the UK.
Once on Mars, the lander will deploy a probe called the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package, which was built by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The probe will be hammered into the ground next to the lander at about 16 feet deep. NASA hopes that this tool will provide them with precise measurements of the planets interior activity. Another instrument, RISE (Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment), which is being provided by JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), will take precise measurements of the planet's rotation.
NASA says that though the InSight mission has been delayed, it is still on track with its other plans to visit the Red planet. Its future plans for Mars include another rover slated to land in 2020, and of course plans for human missions for the 2030s are still a go.
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