After suspending the mission that was planned for this year, NASA has given the green light on its InSight Mars mission to explore the planet's interior. InSight will now launch in the spring of 2018.

The InSight—a painful backronym of "Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport"—was forced to delay its launch after the discovery of a vacuum leak in one of its crucial pieces of equipment, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS). The SEIS can measure ground movements so small they could fit inside a hydrogen atom but requires a perfect vacuum seal. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will head the effort to redesign and improve the current SEIS.

Getting to other planets is dependent on orbital dynamics, and the next window NASA finds acceptable for landing on Mars is in 2018.

While previous missions to Mars have explored the surface, none have dug deep to get an understanding of the formation and history of the planet itself. Since the surface of Mars is not made of moving plates on a molten core the way Earth's is, it should contain a detailed and precise record of of the planet's history. It's NASA's hope, in fact, that the Martian interior may contain the most detailed records of early planet evolutionary formation out of any planet in the solar system.

Detecting the "vital signs" of the planet, as NASA puts it—including seismology, Martian thermal history, and the dynamics of events like meteorite impacts—will provide crucial information for any would-be future colonists of Mars.

"Our robotic scientific explorers such as InSight are paving the way toward an ambitious journey to send humans to the Red Planet," said Geoff Yoder, acting associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, in Washington in a statement. "It's gratifying that we are moving forward with this important mission to help us better understand the origins of Mars and all the rocky planets, including Earth."

Source: JPL

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