InSight Atlas V Boattail Transport, Lift & Mate

At Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, technicians prepare a boattail fairing for lifting atop a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Centaur upper stage at Space Launch Complex 3. The boattail is an adaptor providing an interface between the Centaur and the payload fairing encapsulating NASA's Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, or InSight, spacecraft. A ULA Atlas V rocket is scheduled to liftoff on May 5, 2018, launching InSight the first mission to explore the deep interior of Mars. It will investigate processes that shaped the rocky planets of the inner solar system including Earth.