InSight, which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is NASA Mars lander designed to explore the Martian interior. The mission successfully landed at Elysium Planitia on Mars on 26 November 2018 and since then has used its suite of instruments, including a seismoter and HP3, a heat flow probe, to bring a new understanding of how the Solar System's terrestrial planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars – and Earth's Moon form and evolve. NASA stated that due to excessive dust on its solar panels preventing it from recharging, they plan to put InSight in low-power mode for detecting seisemic events in July 2022 and continue monitoring the lander through the operational period ending in December 2022
To discuss the status of the mission, its significant achievements and what to expect next, we invited Sue Smrekar, lead for InSight's HP3 instrument, to discuss with SETI Institute Senior Astronomer Franck Marchis and answer to your questions.
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