“But everything has to go perfectly, and Mars could always throw us a curveball.”

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NASA's InSight mission, on track for a Nov. 26 touchdown on Mars, will look for tectonic activity and meteorite impacts on the Red Planet, study how much heat is still flowing through the planet, and track the planet’s wobble as it orbits the sun. InSight and the next Mars rover mission, scheduled for 2020, are both seen as precursors for eventual human exploration of Mars, an objective that NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said on Monday might be achieved as early as the mid-2030s. The target: Elysium Planitia, or a “heavenly plain” near Mars’ equator that Hoffman hopes offers “a really flat-looking area, much like a giant Walmart parking lot.”

NASA's InSight mission, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is designed to give the Red Planet its first thorough check up since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. Teams may get more information from a pair of tiny “stalkers” that launched with the lander. NASA’s InSight spacecraft, the first robotic lander designed to study the deep interior of a distant world, touched down safely on the surface of Mars on Monday with instruments to detect planetary seismic rumblings never measured anywhere but Earth.
The NASA robotic lander InSight lands safely on the Elysium Planitia plain of Mars to study the geology of the red planet.