InSight Lands on Mars!

https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/

The Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission is a robotic lander designed to study the deep interior of the planet Mars. It was manufactured by Lockheed Martin, is managed by NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and most payload instruments it carries were built by European agencies. The mission launched on 5 May 2018 at 11:05 UTC aboard an Atlas V-401 rocket^[ and successfully landed^[13] at Elysium Planitia on Mars on 26 November 2018 at 19:52:59 UTC. InSight traveled 483 million km (300 million mi) during its journey.

InSight‘s objectives are to place a seismometer, called SEIS, on the surface of Mars to measure seismic activity and provide accurate 3D models of the planet’s interior; and measure internal heat flow using a heat probe called HP³ to study Mars’ early geological evolution.^[This could bring a new understanding of how the Solar System’s terrestrial planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars – and Earth’s Moon form and evolve.

The lander was originally planned for launch in March 2016. Following a persistent vacuum failure in the SEIS instrument prior to launch, with the 2016 launch window missed, InSight was returned to Lockheed Martin’s facility in Denver, Colorado, for storage. NASA officials decided in March 2016 to delay launching InSight to May 2018. This allowed time for the seismometer issue to be fixed, although it increased the cost from the previous US$675 million to a total of US$830 million.^[By reusing technology from the Mars Phoenix lander, which successfully landed on Mars in 2008, mission costs and risks were reduced.