Just recently, NASA has managed to make plans to send a new robot to mars. However this one is unlike any of the others because of one very special feature, it can't move. InSight is being sent to mars not to look around and discover like rover does, but to sit still and measure mars’s seismic activity and heat. The process that engineers had to go through in order to make this work was finding out how they could have InSight hammer its own probe into Mars’s crust to gather data. They settled on using a “mechanism inside the spike” that will hammer the sensor up to 5 meters below the surface.
The implications that this can have are that we finally figure out more about mars. Were there volcanoes? Oceans? Rivers? Are there still rivers? With this sensor we can figure all of that out. And once we do we will have further evidence to either confirm or deny the existence of extraterrestrial life. This means that for years to come we will have opened up new fields of study.
The way that this can relate to our JPL project is that in both scenarios it has to do with motion. InSight needs a solid foundation without too many wobbles to do it's work. In our project we also can't have any oscillations at all. Another way that it relates is because both of the projects fall under JPL.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7266