*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.
The Supreme Court has stopped the Biden administration from enforcing a requirement that employees at large businesses be vaccinated against COVID-19 or undergo weekly testing and wear a mask on the job.
President Joe Biden says the government plans to double to 1 billion the rapid, at-home COVID-19 tests to be distributed free to Americans.
Two U.S. science agencies say 2021 was the sixth hottest year on record globally, part of a long-term warming trend.
U.S. doctors have transplanted a pig heart into a patient in a last-ditch effort to save his life — a first for medical science. Doctors at University of Maryland School of Medicine said Monday the patient is doing well three days after surgery.
The president of Turkmenistan is calling for an end to one of the country's most notable but infernal sights.
Locked in a dispute over his COVID-19 vaccination status, Novak Djokovic was confined to an immigration detention hotel in Australia on Thursday.
Starbucks says its U.S. workers must be fully vaccinated by Feb. 9 or face a weekly COVID testing requirement
Hundreds of motorists are waiting desperately for help after being stranded all night in freezing temperatures along a 50-mile stretch of highway south of the nation’s capital.
Tens of thousands of Coloradans driven from their neighborhoods by a wind-whipped wildfire are anxiously waiting to learn what's left standing of their lives.
New Year's Eve, Colorado Fires & Free Money
