NASA's InSight lander should get there on Nov. 26th. Not mentioned in the article is why they chose to launch from Vandenberg: It turned out to be cheaper to launch from there than to ship it to Florida for launch. This is despite the fact that they would have to use a larger rocket since they'd not be getting a boost from the Earth's rotation to speed the probe on its way. Another interesting tidbit is that part of the cost-saving efforts for the mission was in using left-over bits from previous missions. Remember the Mars Phoenix Lander which used left-over components from the failed Mars Polar Lander? They did the same thing with this probe.
This is pretty routine practice. The Magellan probe to Venus used leftover hardware from several previous missions. Most notably the spacecraft body of the "third" Voyager probe.
Not that routine. For both the Phoenix Lander and this mission, NASA has cannibalized the stuff that they'd normally never send to space. These are the "backups" which NASA keeps on hand to examine when something goes wrong with the mission, to try and troubleshoot to see if they can fix the problem.
The InSight team is comprised of scientists and engineers from multiple disciplines and is a unique collaboration between countries and organizations around the world. The science team includes co-investigators from the U.S., France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Proof of life: Yes, it landed on Bart Simpson. Oh and they forgot to take the dust cover off the camera lens.
The dust cover will pop off automatically once they have confirmation the solar panels deployed properly, which we should know in roughly 2 hours as of this post.
It is confirmed. "Insight Is Catching Rays on Mars." https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7294
