InSight on Mars: Overview and Early Results.

After a flawless launch and a quiet half-year cruise to Mars, the InSight spacecraft landedsafely in Elysium Planitia on 26 November 2018 carrying a scientific payload focused on theexploration of the deep interior of the planet. The three core experiments are SEIS (SeismicExperiment for Interior Structure), a six-sensor, broad-band seismic instrument to detectglobal seismic/impact activity and use it to probe planetary structure; HP3 (Heat flow andPhysical Properties Package) for measuring the ground temperature/gradient, thermalconductivity and mechanical penetrability from the surface to 5 m depth; and RISE (Rotationand Interior Structure Experiment), a geodetic planetary rotation investigation usingsub-decimeter-scale precision tracking. These are augmented by APSS (Auxiliary PayloadSensor Suite), an environmental sensor suite comprising a pair of wind and air temperaturesensors (TWINS, Temperature and Winds for INSight), a pressure sensor (PS) and amagnetometer (IFG, InSight FluxGate); and an Instrument Deployment System(IDS), including a robotic arm, a mid-resolution color camera (IDC, InstrumentDeployment Camera) and a wide-angle color camera (ICC, Instrument ContextCamera), all of which additionally support geological investigations of the lander’ssurroundings. The landing site turns out to be remarkably well-suited for the deployment ofSEIS and HP3, and at the time of this writing (January 2019) SEIS is on the groundwith all sensors operating as designed and HP3 deployment is expected withinweeks. All of the other instruments have been successfully commissioned and arereturning science data. In this presentation we will discuss current mission status alongwith key scientific results from the first few months of Mars surface operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]