 A critical milestone for NASA's next Mars lander has been passed, and now the preps are officially underway for launch. And this is your space pod for February 8th, 2018. Insight was scheduled to launch in March 2016, but a problem with one of its instruments on board ended up delaying the launch to the next window in 2018. And now that that instrument has been fixed and the window is approaching, the final tests are underway in order for Insight to be approved for launch. And one of those final tests was the deployment of its solar panels, which was done in the laboratory. And this critical test showed that these solar panels could unfold correctly to power it on the surface of Mars, and most importantly it occurred without flaw. Now this video is one minute long, but it took about six minutes for them to deploy. Now if Insight looks a little familiar to you, you'd not be incorrect. Its design is based off of the same hardware that was used on NASA's Phoenix lander, which landed in the North Polar Region of Mars in 2008. But Insight, which stands for interior exploration using seismic investigations, geotasy, and heat transport will carry a completely different set of instruments interested in answering an entirely different set of questions. Does Mars have tectonic activity? How did Mars form? And how does this compare to the Earth? Now there are three primary instruments that are being sent to the surface of Mars with Insight. The first one of those is RISE, which stands for the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment. This will precisely determine if there are any wobbles in Mars' rotation. A wobble of a particular type and amount will tell us what depth below the surface of Mars its interior core is solid, and what density that core may be, potentially telling us what elements are currently present. The next one, HP3, the Heat Flow and Physical Properties probe. This instrument will bury itself five meters into the surface of Mars. This is the deepest any instrument has penetrated Mars' surface. It will measure heat flowing deep under from Mars' interior. The hope is that the data returned will help us determine whether Mars was made of the same material that the Earth and the Moon were formed from. And we should also be able to determine how Mars changed after its initial formation. But the most exciting instrument being carried to me is SEIS, the Seismic Experiment for Internal Structure. We're literally going to place a seismometer on another planet and see what will get back. We expect to detect things like meteoroid impacts into the surface of Mars, potential Mars quakes, and maybe even the movement of magma deep below the surface of Mars. Much like how we use earthquakes in their seismic waves traveling through the Earth's interior to know what's actually there, scientists will likewise use these waves from possible Mars quakes and impact events to probe the interior structure. Now SEIS is so sensitive, it can detect movement down to half a width of a hydrogen atom. Yes, half a width of a hydrogen atom. And as such, it's going to sit inside of a vacuum and it's covered to protect it from Martian winds and thermal effects. Now two cameras will also be on INSIGHT, but both are primarily being used to determine a safe place to put several of these instruments on the surface of Mars after landing. But it won't just be the lander flying to Mars, two CubeSats will be flying as well to help relay data back to Earth. Marco, standing for Mars Cube 1, is a pair of CubeSats and they'll relay the communications back to Earth as INSIGHT plunges into Mars' atmosphere for its own brand of the well-known Seven Minutes of Terror. These will be the first interplanetary CubeSats. Now INSIGHT is a fantastic example of the potential of planetary sciences. We're not just going to Mars to understand it as a planet, we're also going for an enhanced understanding of Earth itself, because as counterintuitive as it sounds, sometimes we learn quite a lot about Earth by leaving it. Now don't forget that we've got our live show every Saturday at 1800 coordinated universal time, and you can tune in on a multitude of areas in order to watch us do our show live. And on orbit 11.05, our previous one from this week, we had Australian space startup Gilmore Space Technologies on, so like and subscribe to us to stay informed and until the next space pod, keep exploring.