NASA's InSight Survived the Trip to Mars ー Now Comes the Wait for Results
*By Conor White*
The Curiosity rover is no longer alone on Mars.
NASA's InSight lander successfully touched down on the Red Planet Monday afternoon, but spectators will have months to wait before any results arrive.
"It's a 26-month mission," said Sarah Lewin, an associate editor at Space.com said. The first results from InSight's experiments are expected sometime in the spring.
InSight marks NASA's first mission to Mars since Curiosity began its journey in 2011. The launch was originally scheduled for 2016 before officials discovered a leak in the rocket's vacuum chamber. As a result, InSight missed its launch window. The delay and necessary repairs added almost $154 million to the mission's price tag, bringing it to a total cost of $814 million.
And even those years of planning didn't guarantee a success.
"Mars missions have like a 40 percent success rate across the world," Lewin said. "NASA is a little bit higher, so there was a definite chance it wouldn't work."
Now that it has safely landed, the probe will be responsible for drilling into Mars ー largely to determine the planet's composition. The robot will also monitor the planet for "Marsquakes."
"We've put a lot of things on Mars that are either orbiters, which are looking down on it, or rovers like Curiosity exploring the surface, but we really don't know what's going on inside," Lewin said.
Neil Young has come up with an ultimatum for Spotify: his music or Joe Rogan’s podcast. This comes over concerns that the podcast is spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation to its listeners. "The Joe Rogan Experience," which is exclusive to Spotify, is currently the number one streamed podcast on the platform.
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Anyone who remembers the 70s and 80s will probably remember acid rain. Industrial emissions acidified precipitation around the globe, which killed forests and crops, rendered lakes inhospitable, corroded buildings, and exacerbated human health problems.
But anyone who follows environmental news will be surprised to learn this: we solved it! Countries came together to limit acid rain-causing emissions, eliminating the problem altogether.
…kind of. Acidic precipitation may not be a thing of the past after all.
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Kelsey Ramsden, Co-Founder, President & CEO, Mind Cure Health, joins Cheddar Reveals to break down what 'psychedelic therapy' could look like once it's legalized and how Mind Cure Health is using AI to help treat everything from addiction to depression.
On this episode of Cheddar Reveals, Natalie Ginsberg, Global Impact Officer, MAPS, discusses the MAPS organization and its current initiatives and their work to get FDA approval for MDMA to treat PTSD; Kelsey Ramsden, Co-Founder, President & CEO, Mind Cure Health, breaks down what 'psychedelic therapy' could look like once it's legalized and how Mind Cure Health is using AI to help treat everything from addiction to depression; Cheddar gets a look at Curiosity Stream's 'Pain, Pus and Poison.'
