New mission to Red Planet gets green light

Two weeks after landing the Curiosity rover on Mars without a hitch, scientists and engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory learned that their InSight mission to study the Martian interior had received the go-ahead from NASA.

InSight — short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — will use a lander to understand how Mars, Earth and other rocky planets were formed in the early days of the solar system.

Planned to launch in March 2016 and reach Mars six months later, the lander would operate for 720 days and give the Red Planet the equivalent of a doctor's physical — checking its pulse, gauging its reflexes and taking its temperature.