Mission controllers at NASA-JPL have received a signal from NASA’s InSight lander on the Mars surface via MarCO OR a beep from InSight’s X-band radio. In the coming hours, engineers will be checking on the spacecraft’s health. A post-landing news briefing expected at 2 p.m. PST (5 p.m. EST).</s>When NASA’s InSight lander successfully touched down on Mars yesterday, it was the end of a seven-month journey to the Red Planet. But the landing also marked the beginning of the next phase of the spacecraft's two-year, $850-million mission.

“Now that we’re on the surface of Mars, we have a lot of work to go,” Elizabeth Barrett, who leads the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory charged with deploying and operating InSight’s instruments, said in a news briefing yesterday after the landing.

“The first thing we’ll do is assess the health of our spacecraft and the health of the instruments that went with us, and then look at our landing site,” she added.

The 800-pound lander is parked on a broad plain north of the Martian equator known as Elysium Planitia — a mostly rock-free area that was faintly visible in the first photo sent back from the lander. Over the next two to three months, Barrett and her team will direct the lander’s six-foot-long robotic arm to pluck each science instrument from the craft and place it directly on the Martian surface.

“I liken it to playing that claw game at a carnival, but you’re doing it with a really, really valuable prize, and you’re doing it blindfolded, where you can only take occasional pictures, and then you’re doing it via remote control on another planet,” Barrett said.

The team will begin with InSight’s dome-shaped seismometer, which is designed to eavesdrop on Mars’ deep interior, listening in on seismic activity and measuring the frequency and magnitude of marsquakes.

About two weeks after the seismometer and its protective shield are in place, the arm will be used to deploy a probe that will hammer itself as far down as 16 feet below the surface. This probe will measure how much heat is coming from deep within the planet.

The seismometer and heat probe are designed to give scientists new insights into how Mars, Earth and other rocky planets formed and evolved.

Even though InSight’s landing spot is mostly flat, placing the craft’s instruments on the surface is a delicate, risky process. But the team at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, will have time to rehearse.

“We have a test bed here that we’ll actually terraform to look very much like the Martian area we land in, and we’ll practice deploying to make sure everything is going to go smoothly,” Barrett said.

Once InSight’s instruments are in place, the lander’s science mission can begin in earnest. “At that point, we’ll be sitting back and listening for those marsquakes and measuring the vital signs of Mars,” Barrett said. “We’re really looking forward to that.”

Want more stories about Mars?
• Robert Zubrin wants to establish a 'new branch of civilization' on Mars
• Here's what future Mars and lunar space colonies could look like
• A lake on Mars? Discovery of liquid water below planet's surface stokes hopes of finding life</s>A NASA spacecraft designed to burrow beneath the surface of Mars landed on the red planet Monday after a six-month, 482 million-kilometre journey and a perilous, six-minute descent through the rose-hued atmosphere.

Flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, leaped out of their seats and erupted in screams, applause and laughter as news came in that the three-legged InSight lander had touched down on the red planet.

The InSight lander reached the surface after being slowed by a parachute and braking engines, the space agency said. Updates were coming in via radio signals that take more than eight minutes to cross the nearly 160 million kilometres between Mars and Earth.

It was NASA's ninth attempt to land at Mars since the 1976 Viking probes. All but one of the previous U.S. touchdowns were successful.

NASA last landed on Mars in 2012 with the Curiosity rover.

The plan called for the spacecraft to go from 19,800 km/h to zero in six minutes flat as it pierced the Martian atmosphere and settled on the surface.

"Landing on Mars is one of the hardest single jobs that people have to do in planetary exploration," said InSight's lead scientist, Bruce Banerdt. "It's such a difficult thing, it's such a dangerous thing that there's always a fairly uncomfortably large chance that something could go wrong."

Mars has been the graveyard for a multitude of space missions. Up to now, the success rate at the red planet has been only 40 per cent, counting every attempted flyby, orbital flight and landing by the U.S., Russia and other countries since 1960.

The U.S., however, has pulled off seven successful Mars landings in the past four decades, not counting InSight, with only one failed touchdown. No other country has managed to set and operate a spacecraft on the dusty red surface.

InSight was shooting for Elysium Planitia, a plain near the Martian equator that the InSight team hopes is as flat as a parking lot in Kansas with few, if any, rocks.

This is no rock-collecting expedition. Instead, the stationary 360-kilogram lander will use its 1.8-metre robotic arm to place a mechanical mole and seismometer on the ground. The self-hammering mole will burrow five metres down to measure the planet's internal heat, while the seismometer listens for possible quakes.

Nothing like this has been attempted before on Mars, a planet nearly 160 million kilometres from Earth. No lander has dug deeper than several inches, and no seismometer has ever worked on Mars.

By examining the interior of Mars, scientists hope to understand how our solar system's rocky planets formed 4.5 billion years ago and why they turned out so different — Mars cold and dry, Venus and Mercury burning hot, and Earth hospitable to life.

InSight has no life-detecting capability, however. That will be left to future rovers. NASA's Mars 2020 mission, for instance, will collect rocks that will eventually be brought back to Earth and analyzed for evidence of ancient life.</s>After months in space, the NASA InSight probe has successfully touched down on Mars. The long-awaited landing came with the usual “seven minutes of terror” while signals from Mars crawled back to Earth at the speed of light. There was nothing to fear this time, though. NASA reports that InSight’s automated landing sequence performed perfectly and the probe is conducting systems checks in preparation for science operations.

Landing on Mars is no easy feat, not even for a small stationary robot like InSight. Mars has an atmosphere thick enough to incinerate or deflect an incoming spacecraft. InSight had to hit the atmosphere at an angle of 12 degrees exactly. Too shallow and InSight would have bounced off and tumbled into deep space. Too steep, and it would burn up before reaching the surface.

Three and a half minutes after entering the atmosphere, InSight deployed its parachute and ejected the heat shield. The atmosphere is thick enough to generate dangerous heat, but it’s not thick enough for parachutes to work all the way down. While InSight slowed itself with its parachute, it was too heavy to reach a safe landing speed. The answer, as with Curiosity, was a bank of small rockets. Forty-five seconds before touchdown, InSight jettisoned its chutes and activated the rockets for a nice, gentle landing. The team was extremely happy with the landing, as you can see in the tweet below.

InSight confirmed it was on the surface with a quick pulse shortly after 2 PM ET, making this the first NASA Mars landing in six years. InSight followed up its brief hello with an image of the landing site. The probe isn’t designed to take a lot of impressive photos, so you won’t learn anything new from the photo. However, it shows InSight is sitting level on a smooth area called Elysium Planitia. That’s important as NASA prepares to deploy InSight’s solar panels later today. As long as those work after the tumultuous landing, it should be smooth sailing for InSight.

During its two year mission on Mars, InSight will use instruments to study the planet’s interior. The probe is outfitted with a seismometer that will gather data on tremors beneath the Martian surface. Speaking of beneath the surface, InSight will also dig 5 meters down to measure the planet’s temperature. NASA will also monitor radio pulses from InSight as a way to track Mars’ rotation and wobble, which could help us understand its internal structure.

Now read: NASA Selects Ancient Crater Lake as Landing Site for Future Mars Rover, NASA Certifies Falcon 9 to Carry Its Most Important Spacecraft, and NASA Shares Photo of ‘Flying Saucer’ Crash</s>And you thought finding a parking place could be difficult.

To reach its reserved spot on Mars, NASA’s InSight lander on Monday must hit a precise spot in the Red Planet’s upper atmosphere, survive a searing plunge to the surface involving a supersonic parachute and touch down softly on a tripod of legs.

Mission managers at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California are feeling a mix of excitement and nerves about the process formally called Entry, Descent and Landing, or EDL, but informally known as “seven minutes of terror.”

“Everything that we’ve done to date makes us feel comfortable and confident we’re going to land on Mars,” said Tom Hoffman, the mission’s project manager at JPL. “But everything has to go perfectly, and Mars could always throw us a curveball.”

More: How to become an astronaut: Tales from Mae Jemison and Leland Melvin about training for space

More: In search for life on Mars, NASA’s 2020 Rover mission will land in an ancient lakebed

NASA's InSight mission, on track for a Nov. 26 touchdown on Mars, will look for tectonic activity and meteorite impacts on the Red Planet, study how much heat is still flowing through the planet, and track the planet’s wobble as it orbits the sun. This helps answer key questions about how the rocky planets of the solar system formed.

Less than half of the missions ever launched to Mars have made it to their destination.

NASA’s $814 million InSight mission, which plans to study Mars’ deep interior, will take its turn six years after the Curiosity rover and nearly seven months after a May 5 blastoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on an Atlas V rocket.

Around 2:40 p.m. EST Monday, the probe will pivot its heat shield to face Mars and separate from a cruise stage that on Sunday briefly fired an engine one last time — equivalent to a “breath of air,” Hoffman said — to line up the landing zone.

The target: Elysium Planitia, or a “heavenly plain” near Mars’ equator that Hoffman hopes offers “a really flat-looking area, much like a giant Walmart parking lot.”

NASA's InSight mission, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is designed to give the Red Planet its first thorough check up since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. The mission launched May 5 from California and is set to land on Mars on Monday, Nov. 26.

Minutes later, the spacecraft will hit the upper atmosphere at 12,300 mph, needing to slow down to 5 mph, or else risk creating a new crater on the Martian surface.

Landing on Mars is a particularly difficult challenge, NASA says, because its gravitational pull combined with a very thin atmosphere, about 1 percent of Earth’s, makes slowing down hard.

InSight’s heat shield will feel temperatures approaching 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to melt steel — during its descent.

If all goes well, after slowing to about 850 mph, at roughly seven miles above the surface, the spacecraft will pop out a supersonic parachute for more braking power, then drop its heat shield, deploy three landing legs and begin scanning the surface with radar pulses.

More: I trained to be an astronaut on a mission to Mars at Space Camp. Here's what it's like.

More: Humans could be heading to Mars in 25 years, NASA says

After shedding a backshell and a brief free-fall, InSight will fire a dozen retro-rockets to soften the 789-pound lander’s touchdown in a cloud of red dust around 2:47 p.m.

Back on Earth, white-knuckled engineers at JPL will await word of the lander’s fate.

Within about eight minutes, the time radio signals will take to traverse the 91 million miles to Earth, they hope to hear a beep signifying that the lander is safe.

“I’m going to be very excited once we get that first signal back that shows we’ve successfully landed on Mars,” said Hoffman.

Teams may get more information from a pair of tiny “stalkers” that launched with the lander.

NASA's Insight mission is targeting a touchdown on Elysium Planitia, a flat-smooth plain just north of the equator that makes for the perfect location from which to study the deep Martian interior.

Two experimental NASA spacecraft known as CubeSats, each about the size of a briefcase, are the first of their kind to travel in deep space. Engineers hope they'll be able to relay news about the lander’s descent and health as they fly by the Red Planet roughly 3,000 miles behind InSight.

Otherwise, mission teams will have to be patient. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter will fly overhead and transmit the data about three hours after landing. Confirmation that power-generating solar arrays have unfurled will take closer to six hours.

InSIght — short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — then will begin a months-long process of robotically placing science several instruments on the surface of Mars, chief among them a seismometer provided by France.

More: This NASA probe got closer to the Sun than any other spacecraft

That will begin a minimum two-year study of the layers making up the planet’s, crust, mantle and core, measuring “marsquakes” to create a 3-D picture of Mars’ interior.

Scientists expect that knowledge to advance understanding about the evolution of planets, including Earth and planets orbiting other stars.

“There’s a lot of things that can go wrong,” Bruce Banerdt, the mission’s lead scientist from JPL, said Sunday. “I’m actually really confident, personally, that we’re going to land safely (Monday). Doesn’t mean I’m not nervous.”</s>Jubilant NASA engineers cheered Monday as the $828 million InSight lander signaled a safe landing on Mars, where it will take the pulse of the Red Planet by monitoring seismic waves from quakes and meteor strikes.

A dust-speckled image of the Martian plain, blurred by a lens cap, transmitted from the spacecraft was the first direct indication that it had touched down successfully. As a safety measure, two tiny experimental CubeSat spacecraft called MarCO that followed InSight to Mars also relayed its landing data to Earth.</s>NASA’s InSight spacecraft, the first robotic lander designed to study the deep interior of a distant world, touched down safely on the surface of Mars on Monday with instruments to detect planetary seismic rumblings never measured anywhere but Earth.

Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles burst into cheers, applause and hugs as they received signals confirming InSight’s arrival on Martian soil — a vast, barren plain near the planet’s equator — shortly before 3 pm EST (2000 GMT).

Minutes later, JPL controllers received a fuzzy “selfie” photograph of the probe’s new surroundings on the Red Planet, showing the edge of one lander leg beside a rock.

Watch parties for NASA’s live television coverage of the event were held at museums, libraries and other public venues around the world, including Times Square, where a small crowd of 40 or 50 people braved pouring rain to witness the broadcast on a giant TV screen affixed to a wall of the Nasdaq building.

InSight’s descent and landing, consisting of about 1,000 individual steps that had to be flawlessly executed to achieve success, capped a six-month journey of 301 million miles (548 million km) from Earth.

The spacecraft was launched from California in May on its nearly $1 billion mission. It will spend the next 24 months — about one Martian year — collecting a wealth of data to unlock mysteries about how Mars formed and, by extension, the origins of the Earth and other rocky planets of the inner solar system.

“The reason why we’re digging into Mars is to better understand not just Mars, but the Earth itself,” said JPL’s Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator. A central question is why Mars, once a relatively warm, wet planet, evolved so differently from Earth into a mostly dry, desolate and cold world, devoid of life.

The answers are believed to have something to do with the as-yet unexplained absence, since Mars’ ancient past, of either a magnetic field or tectonic activity, said NASA’s chief scientist James Green.

While Earth’s tectonics and other forces have erased most evidence of its early history, much of Mars — about one-third the size of Earth — has seemingly remained largely static, creating a geologic time machine for scientists, Green said.

InSight and the next Mars rover mission, scheduled for 2020, are both seen as precursors for eventual human exploration of Mars, an objective that NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said on Monday might be achieved as early as the mid-2030s.

InSight was the eighth spacecraft to have landed successfully on Mars, all of them operated by NASA.

The three-legged lander streaked into the thin Martian atmosphere at 12,300 miles (19,795 km) per hour and plunged 77 miles to the surface within seven minutes, slowed to a gentle touchdown by atmospheric friction, a giant parachute and retro rockets.

The stationary probe was programmed to pause for 16 minutes for the dust to settle, literally, around its landing site, before two disc-shaped solar panels were to be unfurled like wings to provide power to the spacecraft.

But scientists did not expect to verify successful deployment of the solar arrays for at least several hours.

The 880-pound (360 kg) InSight - its name is short for Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport - marks the 21st U.S.-launched Mars mission, dating back to the Mariner fly-bys of the 1960s.

Nearly two dozen other Mars missions have been sent from other nations.

InSight’s new home in the middle of Elysium Planitia, a wide, relatively smooth expanse close to the planet’s equator, is roughly 373 miles (600 km) from the 2012 landing spot of the car-sized Mars rover Curiosity, the last spacecraft sent to the Red Planet by NASA.

InSight’s primary instrument is a French-built seismometer, designed to record the slightest vibrations from “marsquakes” and meteor impacts around the planet. The device, to be placed on the surface by the lander’s robot arm, is so sensitive it can measure a seismic wave just one half the radius of a hydrogen atom.

Scientists expect to see a dozen to 100 marsquakes during the mission, producing data to help them deduce the depth, density and composition of the planet’s core, the rocky mantle surrounding it, and the outermost layer, the crust.

The NASA Viking probes of the mid-1970s were equipped with seismometers, too, but they were bolted to the top of the landers, a design that proved largely ineffective.

Apollo missions to the moon brought seismometers to the lunar surface as well. But InSight is expected to yield the first meaningful data on planetary seismic tremors beyond Earth.

A second instrument, furnished by Germany’s space agency, consists of a drill to burrow as much as 16 feet (5 metres) underground, pulling behind it a rope-like thermal probe to measure heat flowing from inside the planet.

Meanwhile, a radio transmitter will send back signals tracking Mars’ subtle rotational wobble to reveal the size of the planet’s core and possibly whether it remains molten.

NASA officials say it will take two to three months for the main instruments to be deployed and put into operation.

The landing data and initial photograph were relayed to Earth from two briefcase-sized satellites that were launched along with InSight and were flying past Mars as it reached its destination.

The twin “Cubesats” tagging along for the flight to Mars represented the first deep-space use of a miniature satellite technology that space engineers see as a promising low-cost alternative to some larger, more complex vehicles.</s>A NASA spacecraft designed to burrow beneath the surface of Mars landed on the red planet Monday after a six-month, 300 million-mile (482 million-kilometer) journey and a perilous, six-minute descent through the rose-hued atmosphere.

Flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, leaped out of their seats and erupted in screams, applause and laughter as the news came in.

The three-legged InSight spacecraft reached the surface after being slowed by a parachute and braking engines, the space agency said. Updates were coming in via radio signals that take more than eight minutes to cross the nearly 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) between Mars and Earth.

It was NASA's ninth attempt to land at Mars since the 1976 Viking probes. All but one of the previous U.S. touchdowns were successful.

NASA last landed on Mars in 2012 with the Curiosity rover.

Viewings were held coast to coast at museums, planetariums and libraries, as well as New York's Times Square.

The plan called for the spacecraft to go from 12,300 mph (19,800 kph) to zero in six minutes flat as it pierced the Martian atmosphere and settled on the surface.

"Landing on Mars is one of the hardest single jobs that people have to do in planetary exploration," said InSight's lead scientist, Bruce Banerdt. "It's such a difficult thing, it's such a dangerous thing that there's always a fairly uncomfortably large chance that something could go wrong."

Mars has been the graveyard for a multitude of space missions. Up to now, the success rate at the red planet has been only 40 percent, counting every attempted flyby, orbital flight and landing by the U.S., Russia and other countries since 1960.

The U.S., however, has pulled off seven successful Mars landings in the past four decades, not counting InSight, with only one failed touchdown. No other country has managed to set and operate a spacecraft on the dusty red surface.

InSight was shooting for Elysium Planitia, a plain near the Martian equator that the InSight team hopes is as flat as a parking lot in Kansas with few, if any, rocks.

This is no rock-collecting expedition. Instead, the stationary 800-pound (360-kilogram) lander will use its 6-foot (1.8-meter) robotic arm to place a mechanical mole and seismometer on the ground. The self-hammering mole will burrow 16 feet (5 meters) down to measure the planet's internal heat, while the seismometer listens for possible quakes.

NASA's InSight mission, short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is designed to give the Red Planet its first thorough check up since it formed 4.5 billion years ago.

Nothing like this has been attempted before at our next-door neighbor, nearly 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) away. No lander has dug deeper than several inches, and no seismometer has ever worked on Mars.

By examining the interior of Mars, scientists hope to understand how our solar system's rocky planets formed 4.5 billion years ago and why they turned out so different — Mars cold and dry, Venus and Mercury burning hot, and Earth hospitable to life.

InSight has no life-detecting capability, however. That will be left to future rovers. NASA's Mars 2020 mission, for instance, will collect rocks that will eventually be brought back to Earth and analyzed for evidence of ancient life.

NASA's Insight mission is targeting a touchdown on Elysium Planitia, a flat-smooth plain just north of the equator that makes for the perfect location from which to study the deep Martian interior.

Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.</s>After seven months of traveling through space, the NASA InSight mission has landed on Mars. A few minutes after landing, InSight sent the official “beep” to NASA to signal that it was alive and well, including a photo of the Martian surface where it landed.

Mission Control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory exploded into celebratory applause and cheers after the touchdown was confirmed. The landing was watched around the world and even broadcast live on the Nasdaq Stock Market tower in New York City’s Times Square.

During a post-landing NASA press conference, the astronauts on the International Space Station called down to congratulate the mission team and said they “got some goosebumps” watching the coverage.

“Today, we successfully landed on Mars for the eighth time in human history,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said. “InSight will study the interior of Mars and will teach us valuable science as we prepare to send astronauts to the Moon and later to Mars. This accomplishment represents the ingenuity of America and our international partners, and it serves as a testament to the dedication and perseverance of our team. The best of NASA is yet to come, and it is coming soon.”

Bridenstine said that Vice President Mike Pence called to congratulate the entire team.

InSight, or Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, is going to explore a part of Mars that we know the least about: its deep interior. It launched May 5. InSight will spend two years investigating the interior where the building blocks below the planet’s surface recorded its history.

To reach Mars, InSight cruised 301,223,981 miles at a top speed of 6,200 miles per hour in space, followed by two cube satellites. The suitcase-size spacecraft, called MarCO, are the first cube satellites to fly into deep space. MarCO shared data about InSight when it entered the Martian atmosphere for the landing.

“We’ve studied Mars from orbit and from the surface since 1965, learning about its weather, atmosphere, geology and surface chemistry,” said Lori Glaze, acting director of the Planetary Science Division in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “Now we finally will explore inside Mars and deepen our understanding of our terrestrial neighbor as NASA prepares to send human explorers deeper into the solar system.”

The first image taken by InSight includes the dust cover still on the lens, which will be removed this week. The black specks are dust, and there’s a rock in the left foreground. To the right is one footpad of the lander.

The MarCO cube satellites also bid farewell to InSight after it landed and their own mission ended. MarCO-B took an image of Mars from 4,700 miles away during its flyby at 3:10 p.m. ET after helping to establish communications with mission control about the landing.

InSight robotically guided itself through the landing. The landing itself is a tricky maneuver. NASA engineers don’t call it “seven minutes of terror” for nothing. In less time than it takes to hard-boil an egg, InSight slowed from 12,300 mph to 5 mph before it gently landed on the surface of Mars, according to NASA.

“While most of the country was enjoying Thanksgiving with their family and friends, the InSight team was busy making the final preparations for Monday’s landing,” said Tom Hoffman of JPL, InSight’s project manager. “Landing on Mars is difficult and takes a lot of personal sacrifices, such as missing the traditional Thanksgiving, but making InSight successful is well worth the extraordinary effort.”

Only 40% of missions sent to the Red Planet by any agency have been successful. Part of this is due to the thin Martian atmosphere, which is only 1% of Earth’s, so there’s nothing to slow something trying to land on the surface.

Like the Phoenix spacecraft, InSight had a parachute and retro rockets to slow its descent through the atmosphere, and three legs suspended from the lander absorbed the shock of touching down on the surface.

But the engineers prepared the spacecraft to land during a dust storm if need be.

About 20 minutes before landing, InSight separated from the cruise stage that helped bring it all the way to Mars and turned to position itself for entering the atmosphere.

At 2:47 p.m. ET, the entry, descent and landing phase began, and InSight came blazing into the atmosphere at 12,300 mph. Peak heating of the protective heat shield reached 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit two minutes later. This is when the intense heat caused a temporary drop in the radio signal from the craft.

Then, the parachute deployed, the craft separated from the heat shield, deployed its three legs and activated radar to sense how far it is from the ground. After getting that radar signal, it separated from the remaining shell and parachute, firing its descent engines known as retrorockets to help slow it down even more.

In ballet-like fashion, InSight executed a gravity turn to make sure the lander was in the right position before touching down. It slowed until it reached a consistent 5 mph. Then, it touched down at 2:54 p.m. ET.

Just before 3 p.m. ET, InSight sent a signal to let scientists on Earth know that it’s alive and well.

“We hit the Martian atmosphere at 12,300 mph, and the whole sequence to touching down on the surface took only 6½ minutes,” Hoffman said. “During that short span of time, InSight had to autonomously perform dozens of operations and do them flawlessly — and by all indications, that is exactly what our spacecraft did.”

Bruce Banerdt of JPL, InSight’s principal investigator, said, “It’s taken more than a decade to bring InSight from a concept to a spacecraft approaching Mars — and even longer since I was first inspired to try to undertake this kind of mission. But even after landing, we’ll need to be patient for the science to begin.”

What happens next

InSight’s two-year science mission won’t begin right away. It will take two to three months for the robotic arm to place the mission’s instruments on the surface. Meanwhile, mission scientists will photograph what can be seen from the lander’s perspective and monitor the environment. Science data isn’t expected until March.

Later Monday, mission scientists should be able to confirm that the spacecraft’s solar arrays have unfurled.

“We are solar-powered, so getting the arrays out and operating is a big deal,” Hoffman said. “With the arrays providing the energy, we need to start the cool science operations. We are well on our way to thoroughly investigate what’s inside of Mars for the very first time.”

InSight landed at Elysium Planitia, called “the biggest parking lot on Mars” by astronomers. Because it won’t be roving over the surface, the landing site was an important determination. This spot is open, flat, safe and boring, which is what the scientists want for a stationary two-year mission.

InSight will unfurl its solar panels and robotic arm and study the entire planet from its parking spot. It’s along the Martian equator, bright and warm enough to power the lander’s solar array year-round.

The suite of geophysical instruments on InSight sounds like a doctor’s bag, giving Mars its first “checkup” since it formed. Together, those instruments will take measurements of Mars’ vital signs, like its pulse, temperature and reflexes — which translates to internal activity like seismology and the planet’s wobble as the sun and its moons tug on Mars.

These instruments include the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structures to investigate what causes the seismic waves on Mars the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package to burrow beneath the surface and determine heat flowing out of the planet and the Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment to use radios to study the planet’s core.

“Landing was thrilling, but I’m looking forward to the drilling,” Banerdt said. “When the first images come down, our engineering and science teams will hit the ground running, beginning to plan where to deploy our science instruments. Within two or three months, the arm will deploy the mission’s main science instruments, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) and Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instruments.”

Meanwhile, the mission for MarCO has ended. But it proves that cube satellites can survive the trek into deep space.

“Every Mars landing is daunting, but now with InSight safely on the surface, we get to do a unique kind of science on Mars,” JPL director Michael Watkins said. “The experimental MarCO CubeSats have also opened a new door to smaller planetary spacecraft. The success of these two unique missions is a tribute to the hundreds of talented engineers and scientists who put their genius and labor into making this a great day.”</s>NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, that is currently orbiting the Red Planet, relayed the signals

After the successful launch of NASA's InSight on Mars on Monday, the spacecraft has sent signals to Earth indicating that its solar panels are open and collecting sunlight on the Martian surface.

NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft, that is currently orbiting the Red Planet, relayed the signals. It was received on Earth at about 5.30 p.m. PST (8.30 p.m. EST), the US space agency said in a statement.

Solar array deployment ensures the spacecraft can recharge its batteries each day. Odyssey also relayed a pair of images showing InSight's landing site.

"The InSight team can rest a little easier tonight now that we know the spacecraft solar arrays are deployed and recharging the batteries," said Tom Hoffman, InSight's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"It's been a long day for the team. But tomorrow begins an exciting new chapter for InSight: surface operations and the beginning of the instrument deployment phase," Hoffman added.

On Monday, NASA's Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander successfully touched down on the Red Planet after an almost seven-month, 300-million-mile (458-million-kilometre) journey from Earth.

InSight was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on May 5. The lander touched down on Monday, near Mars' equator on the western side of a flat, smooth expanse of lava called Elysium Planitia, with a signal affirming a completed landing sequence at approximately noon PST (3 p.m. EST).

The spacecraft's two-year mission will be to study the deep interior of Mars to learn how all celestial bodies with rocky surfaces, including Earth and the Moon, formed, NASA said.

InSight's twin solar arrays are each seven feet (2.2 meters) wide when they're open, the entire lander is about the size of a big 1960s convertible. Mars has weaker sunlight than Earth because it's much farther away from the Sun.

But the lander doesn't need much to operate: The panels provide 600 to 700 watts on a clear day, enough to power a household blender and plenty to keep its instruments conducting science on the Red Planet. Even when dust covers the panels -- what is likely to be a common occurrence on Mars -- they should be able to provide at least 200 to 300 watts.

"We are solar powered, so getting the arrays out and operating is a big deal. With the arrays providing the energy we need to start the cool science operations, we are well on our way to thoroughly investigate what's inside of Mars for the very first time," Hoffman said.

The panels are modelled on those used with NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander, though InSight's are slightly larger in order to provide more power output and to increase their structural strength. These changes were necessary to support operations for one full Mars year (two Earth years).

In the coming days, the mission team will unstow InSight's robotic arm and use the attached camera to snap photos of the ground so that engineers can decide where to place the spacecraft's scientific instruments. It will take two to three months before those instruments are fully deployed and send back data, NASA said.

In the meantime, InSight will use its weather sensors and magnetometer to take readings from its landing site at Elysium Planitia -- its new home on Mars.

With InSight landing successfully on Mars on Monday, NASA has successfully soft-landed a vehicle on the Red Planet eight times, the statement noted.

"Today, we successfully landed on Mars for the eighth time in human history," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.

"InSight will study the interior of Mars, and will teach us valuable science as we prepare to send astronauts to the Moon and later to Mars. This accomplishment represents the ingenuity of America and our international partners and it serves as a testament to the dedication and perseverance of our team. The best of NASA is yet to come, and it is coming soon," he added.

InSight will begin to collect science data within the first week after landing, though the teams will focus mainly on preparing to set InSight's instruments on the Martian ground. At least two days after touchdown, the engineering team will begin to deploy InSight's 5.9-foot-long (1.8-meter-long) robotic arm so that it can take images of the landscape.

InSight will operate on the surface for one Martian year, plus 40 Martian days, or sols, until November 24, 2020. The mission objectives of the two small MarCOs which relayed InSight's telemetry was completed after their Martian flyby.

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The NASA robotic lander InSight lands safely on the Elysium Planitia plain of Mars to study the geology of the red planet.