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JPL / NASA
Mars probe offers NASA a "wonderful birthday present"
NASA's Insight spacecraft has launched its first instrument on Mars as part of its mission to explore the depths of the red planet.
An image sent by the spacecraft showed a bell-shaped earthquake that had been placed on Mars by Insight's massive robotic arm.
The instrument will allow the recording of small earthquakes that occur beneath the Earth's crust and have baffled scientists for decades.
Mars earthquakes are thought to occur regularly, but scientists do not know why.
"The schedule for Mars probe activities has begun," said Tom Hoffman, INS Insight project director at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Better than we expected, "adding," Getting a seismograph to the surface safely is a wonderful birthday present. "
Insight worked hard to deploy and use two major instruments on the surface of the planet, as well as a seismograph containing a range of advanced tools in Britain and France, with a thermal probe penetrating the ground.
Insight will help scientists detect the location and nature of rock layers beneath the surface of Mars.
NASA hopes to understand why rocky planets in the solar system have moved too far away from Earth.
Insight is NASA's eighth successful landing on Mars since the fall of the Viking probe in 1976, the first successful landing on the planet for more than six years since the last spacecraft landed on the red planet.
The Corusity vehicle, which arrived in 2012, is still studying the red planet.
Source: the sun
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