InSight Mission: Prime Mission Operation

The InSight Mission has been conducting science operations on Mars since successfully landing on November 26, 2018. The Deployment Phase included evaluation of the Lander health, surveying the area around the Lander for instrument placement, and deployment of the instruments to the Martian surface. Deployment of instruments directly to the Martian surface has never been done before, and allows the instruments direct contact with Mars. Science data collection started during the Deployment Phase, and the Science Monitoring Phase started immediately after instrument deployment completed. InSight has uncovered the geophysical characteristics of Mars. This allows for a better understanding of formation and evolution of Mars (and other terrestrial planets by comparison). Several instruments and sensors, a subset of which were from international partners, are used to gather the science data. Although operations of the lander and instruments have been very successful, there have been challenges along the way. The challenges involved the lander, instruments, and Mars itself. The largest of these challenges was the Heat Probe and Physical Properties (HP3) mole's difficulty in penetrating the Martian surface. The Project/NASA has invested in an extensive almost two-year Mole Recovery effort that itself posed more challenges. The mole recovery involved performing operations never envisioned and went beyond the original designs of the HP3 and the Instrument Deployment System (IDS). This paper will give a background of the mission describe the surface mission operations, describe overcoming operational challenge, and results of the mission so far.