*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.
Volunteers worked frantically on a second day Wednesday to save dozens of pilot whales that have stranded themselves on a beach in Western Australia, but more than 50 have already died.
The water temperature on the tip of Florida hit hot tub levels, exceeding 100 degrees (37.8 degrees Celsius) two days in a row. And meteorologists say that could potentially be the hottest seawater ever measured, although there are some issues with the reading.
A teenage boy who has been blind for most of his life has been cured due to new gene therapy treatments.
A gorilla thought to be a male gave birth at a zoo in Ohio.
A new study showed a depression diagnosis during adulthood could more than double the risk of getting dementia later in life.
A teen in Cuba who's been legally blind can now see again thanks to new gene therapy treatments.
Plastic-Free July is being observed to highlight the use of plastic and its effects. Cheddar News' Michelle Castillo gave up using single-use plastic for the day and spoke with Kathyrn Kellogg, founder of Going Zero Waste, to get her take.
Be Well: How to Use Your Own Body Weight to Build Strength
Cheddar News checks in with a coast-to-coast forecast of the weather for Tuesday, July 25, 2023.
Wildfires burning in Canada continue to bring smoke south into the U.S with air quality alerts in effect across the Midwest and upper Great Lakes.
