Nasa ska kartlägga Mars inre för första gången

InSight is a robotic Mars lander designed to study the interior and subsurface of Mars, which would in turn help scientists to understand the Earth and Solar System history. The mission is planned to launch in May 2018 and land on the surface of Mars in November 2018, where it will deploy a seismometer and a burrowing heat probe. It will also perform a radio science experiment to study the internal structure of Mars. The lander was manufactured in the 2010s by Lockheed Martin Space Systems and was originally planned for launch in March 2016. Due to the failure of its SEIS instrument prior to launch, NASA announced in December 2015 that the mission had been postponed, and in March 2016, launch was rescheduled for 5 May 2018. The name is a backronym for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. InSight's objective is to place a stationary lander equipped with a seismometer and heat transfer probe on the surface of Mars to study the planet's early geological evolution. This could bring new understanding of the Solar System's terrestrial planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars — and the Earth's Moon. By reusing technology from the Mars Phoenix lander, which successfully landed on Mars in 2008, it is expected that the cost and risk will be reduced. Following a persistent vacuum failure in the main scientific instrument, the launch window was missed, and the InSight spacecraft was returned to Lockheed Martin's facility in Denver, Colorado, for storage. NASA officials decided in March 2016 to spend an estimated US$150 million to delay launching InSight to May 2018. This would allow time for the seismometer issue to be fixed, although it increased the cost from the previous US$675 million to a total of $830 million.