Just two weeks after landing its Curiosity rover on Mars, the US space agency has announced it will send another robot to the planet in 2016. The InSight spacecraft will be a static lander that will carry instruments to investigate Mars' deep interior.

Scientists believe this will help them explain how all the planets formed 4.6 billion years ago - the Earth included. InSight beat two other proposals in a competition to find Nasa's next relatively low-cost mission. This so-called Discovery class of endeavour is cost-capped at $425m, although that figure does not include the rocket to launch the spacecraft.

InSight stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. It will be led from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. The design of the lander leans heavily on the successful Phoenix probe put on the Red Planet in 2008. But although the 2016 venture will look very similar, it will carry very different instrumentation.

What's ironic to me is that NASA is doing more space exploration now than what it was doing with the shuttle.

Well, we have to face, that a human being is just too complex to send to the mars.
Its the same situation what we have with drones. If you leave out the human from the whole equation, you can leave out a lot of stuff, like instruments, air, space, ejection seat, suit, etc...

The "problem" is that nothing replaces the 'human being being there' - In the end this is just like looking at the pictures of the place that you which to travel the most to, while cool nothing beats the fact of actually being physically there! This is human nature.

And I strongly believe that if Soviet Union didn't colapse that either the United States or the Soviet Union or both would already have put a man on Mars by now. (the competition factor)

What's ironic to me is that NASA is doing more space exploration now than what it was doing with the shuttle.

Was it that they were focused on the business side then, trying to generate some money by sending satellites into orbit? Now freed from that task, they have time and other resources available for exploration?

Was it that they were focused on the business side then, trying to generate some money by sending satellites into orbit? Now freed from that task, they have time and other resources available for exploration?