Fantastic news last night, NASA have successfully landed their "Insight" robot on Mars. Confirmation was received at around 20:00 GMT last night and pretty soon after that pictures were being transmitted back from the craft of the surface of the red planet. The Russians we the first to successfully land a vehicle onto the surface (softly) back in 1971 with their Mars 3 explorer but it only functioned for a few seconds before being blasted by a violent storm. The Americans got the first real pictures from the surface with Viking 1 in 1975 and there have been several unmanned missions since then culminating in the "curiosity rover" launched in 2011 and still operational in 2018, it even took a "selfie" to celebrate (see below)...
Insight will focus on studying the internal structure of Mars and is loaded with experiments that look at its seismology and the temperature profile of its outer crust. The initial images are looking fantastic. It's amazing how imaging and computing technology has improved even over the relatively short period since curiosity was designed and built, pretty soon we'll have live'ish (because it takes 4 minutes for a signal to reach Earth from Mars) streaming via YouTube!
Apparently the first thing that the new rover found was a queue of Martians desperately wanting to make a trade deal with Britain, so that's nice..
(PS I made the last bit up)
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