Another Mars robot is settling in for a long, long sleep. With dust caking its solar panels, InSight has been losing the ability to recharge for months -- in the spring, it was operating at just one-tenth of its landing power. Now the thick layers of dust might have doomed InSight for good. NASA announced on December 19 that its InSight lander had not responded to communications from Earth, and "it's assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations." InSight, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport, landed on Mars on November 26, 2018.

The US space agency's (Nasa) InSight mission has positioned the second of its surface instruments on Mars. Known as HP3, the heat-flow probe was picked up off the deck of the lander with a robot arm and placed next to the SEIS seismometer package, which was deployed in December. Together with an onboard radio experiment, these sensor systems will be used to investigate the interior of the planet, to understand its present-day activity and how the sub-surface rocks are layered. It's no easy task to set up such sensitive instruments on the surface of another world. Together we'll unlock some of #Mars' deep secrets.

NASA's six-month expedition to reach Mars to study its interior will take seven minutes to land on Monday at 20:00 GMT. InSight Lander - the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport - is the US space agency's first craft dedicated to peer beneath Mars' surface and monitor its interior. According to NASA, it is the first outer space robotic explorer designed to give the billions-years-old Mars a "thorough checkup" by studying its crust, mantle and core. Out of the 44 NASA missions sent to Mars, only 18 have been successful. The "seven minutes of terror", which are possibly the riskiest in the entire mission, will be when the robotic spacecraft will enter the Martian atmopshere at supersonic speed, then touchdown on the red planet's region called Elysium Planitia.

May 7, 2018 --A streak of rocket fire pierced the foggy predawn skies of southern California Saturday, as NASA sent off its latest Mars mission. The InSight mission is set to rack up a series of "firsts." It will also be the first time CubeSats will deploy in deep space. And, if the mission is successful, it will be the first time that scientists gather direct data on the interior of another planet and detect quakes on another planet. Despite all these firsts, the mission marks the 45th time humans have sent robotic envoys to uncover Mars's secrets (although only about half of those missions are considered a success).

Nasa is about to launch a rover to dig deep into Mars. The engineers behind the mission hope that it could find life and the answer to other mysteries about how the planet was formed. The InSight mission will set off six years after Nasa last sent one of its robot travellers to investigate the Red Planet. And it will continue the same work, digging into the planet to try and learn more about what is hidden down there. It will take the first measurements of "Marsquakes", for instance, and will look into why it seems to wobble a little as it spins around.