InSight, NASA's latest mission to Mars, will launch in less than 3 hours from the time of this post. Watch live here!

1) InSight has no mechanism to clean its solar panels. We're planning on relying on Martian wind and little dust devils to clean off our solar panels for us. The Spirit and Opportunity rovers were able to keep their solar panels quite clean this way, and we're hoping to follow their example.

2) InSight's science goals are actually quite independent of location. Our primary goals are to study Mars quakes and study the interior of Mars, and both of those can be done from anywhere on the surface, so our location constraints were primarily engineering ones. We had three main constraints: we want to be be far away from fault lines, so the Mars quakes can travel a little before they reach us, we want to be as close to the equator as possible, so we get sunlight year-round, and we want to pick somewhere that's as easy to land in as possible. So we picked a very flat area, right on the equator.

3) I love this question! The stated goal of InSight since the beginning has been: "Study Mars to learn about Earth". What's cool about Mars is that it really hasn't changed for the past 4 billion years - what this means is that by studying the Martian interior right now, we really can learn a lot about the early formation of planets in general, including the formation of our own planet. Earth is a CONSTANTLY changing planet, so it's almost impossible to study its early evolution. But by studying Mars, we can learn a lot about early planetary formation. For me, what would be the most exciting would be a breakthrough in the science planetary evolution, so that we can simultaneously learn about Mars AND Earth.

4) I have a very long answer to this question, so remind me to follow up later!

/r/space Thread Parent Link - mars.nasa.gov