If all goes to plan, a postponed mission to probe beneath the surface of Mars will launch in two years, NASA announced Wednesday.

The InSight spacecraft was to head to space this month, but in December, NASA delayed the mission when it realized that there was not enough time to fix stubborn leaks in a vacuum enclosure housing a key instrument.

NASA is now aiming to launch InSight in May 2018, the next time that Earth and Mars are close enough to allow a quick six-month trip. (Because Mars is farther from the Sun than Earth and orbits more slowly, the two planets line up just once every 26 months.)

“I’m thrilled,” said W. Bruce Banerdt, a planetary geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who is the mission’s principal investigator. “We were hoping we would get the opportunity to give this another try.”