*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.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is spawning in an explosion of color as the World Heritage-listed natural wonder recovers from life-threatening coral bleaching episodes.
Climate change that may have contributed to a lobster boom in Maine could soon lead to a bust. Chloe Aiello reports.
Good Morning America co-host Michael Strahan will be among the crew on Blue Origin’s next flight to space.
President Joe Biden is ordering a record-setting 50 million barrels of oil released from America's strategic reserve to help bring down energy costs.
All the news you Need2Know for Tuesday, November 23, 2021.
The U.S. is moving to open up COVID-19 booster shots to all adults, letting them choose another dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.
U.S. health officials say an estimated 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in one year. That's a total the nation has never seen.
Russian officials on Tuesday rejected accusations that they endangered astronauts aboard the International Space Station by conducting a weapons test that created more than 1,500 pieces of space junk.
Austria has taken what its leader called the “dramatic” step of implementing a nationwide lockdown for unvaccinated people who haven’t recently had COVID-19.
Pfizer Inc. said Friday that its experimental antiviral pill for COVID-19 cut rates of hospitalization and death by nearly 90% in high-risk adults, as the drugmaker joins the race to bring the first easy-to-use medication against the coronavirus to the U.S. market.
