Just two weeks after landing its Curiosity rover on Mars, the U.S. space agency NASA has announced a new mission, which will see another robot sent to the Red Planet in 2016.
The new mission, named InSight, will take the first look into the deep interior of Mars to see why the Red Planet evolved so differently from Earth as one of the solar system's rocky planets.
InSight, which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, will place instruments on the Martian surface to investigate whether the core of Mars is solid or liquid like that of Earth, and why Mars' crust is not divided into tectonic plates that drift like Earth's.
Detailed knowledge of the interior of Mars in comparison to Earth will help scientists understand better how terrestrial planets form and evolve.
"The exploration of Mars is a top priority for NASA, and the selection of InSight ensures we will continue to unlock the mysteries of the Red Planet and lay the groundwork for a future human mission there," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "The recent successful landing of the Curiosity rover has galvanized public interest in space exploration and today's announcement makes clear there are more exciting Mars missions to come," he added.
InSight will be led by W. Bruce Banerdt at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Its science team includes U.S. and international co-investigators from universities, industry and government agencies. The French space agency Center National d'Etudes Spatiales, or CNES, and the German Aerospace Center are contributing instruments to InSight, which is scheduled to land on Mars in September 2016 to begin its two-year scientific mission.
InSight is the 12th selection in NASA's series of Discovery-class Missions. Created in 1992, the Discovery Program sponsors frequent, cost-capped solar system exploration missions with highly focused scientific goals. NASA requested Discovery Mission proposals in June 2010 and received 28. InSight was one of three proposed missions selected in May 2011 for funding to conduct preliminary design studies and analyses. The other two proposals were for missions to a comet and Saturn's moon Titan.
InSight builds on spacecraft technology used in NASA's highly successful Phoenix lander mission, which was launched to the Red Planet in 2007 and determined water existed near the surface in the Martian polar regions. By incorporating proven systems in the mission, the InSight team demonstrated that the mission concept was low-risk and could stay within the cost-constrained budget of Discovery missions. The cost of the mission, excluding the launch vehicle and related services, is capped at $425 million.
"Our Discovery Program enables scientists to use innovative approaches to answering fundamental questions about our solar system in the lowest cost mission category," said John Grunsfeld, Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters. "InSight will get to the 'core' of the nature of the interior and structure of Mars, well below the observations we've been able to make from orbit or the surface."
InSight will carry four instruments. JPL will provide an onboard geodetic instrument to determine the planet's rotation axis and a robotic arm and two cameras used to deploy and monitor instruments on the Martian surface. CNES is leading an international consortium that is building an instrument to measure seismic waves traveling through the planet's interior. The German Aerospace Center is building a subsurface heat probe to measure the flow of heat from the interior.
JPL provides project management for NASA's Science Mission Directorate. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, manages the Discovery Program for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver will build the spacecraft. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com
Political News
May 08, 2026 15:50 ET Manufacturing and services sector survey results and labor market data from main economies were the highlight on the economics news front this week. Factory orders and jobs report dominated the news flow in the U.S. Similarly, industrial production data from German garnered attention in Europe. In Asia, purchasing managers’ survey results from China and the central bank decision from Australia were in focus.