CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Six years after last landing on Mars, NASA is sending a robotic geologist to dig deeper than ever before to take the planet’s temperature. The $1 billion U.S.-European mission is the first dedicated to studying the innards of Mars. By probing Mars’ insides, scientists hope to better understand how the red planet — any rocky planet, including our own — formed 4.5 billion years ago. The U.S. is the only country to have successfully landed and operated spacecraft on Mars. Once on the surface, InSight will take interplanetary excavation to a “whole new level,” according to NASA’s science mission director Thomas Zurbuchen.

Source: National Post May 02, 2018 05:34 UTC