The Atlas rocket launched early Saturday from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California — making it the first interplanetary mission to ever take off from the US West Coast.
The unmanned craft, carrying a solar-powered robotic lander named InSight, will take around six months to travel the 485 million kilometers (300 million miles) to Mars. Once there, it'll begin a series of unprecedented excavations aimed at gathering information about the planet's core.
The InSight lander, equipped with an extremely sensitive French-built seismometer, is specifically designed to pick up the smallest vibrations from tremors, or "Marsquakes," that shake the planet.
The $993 million (€830 million) mission ultimately aims to inform efforts to send humans to Mars in the next few decades. If all goes according to plan, the three-legged lander will touch down on a flat area near Mars' equator on November 26.
Nasa last sent seismometers to the Red Planet on the Viking landers in the 1970s. But these missions failed to detect ground vibrations because the instruments were positioned on the body of the probes.
GUYS, WHAT DO YOU THINK?
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Paulorossi Babatunde Akins
If Nigeria start something like this that mean another snake will swallow money too,that what I mean
Salako Saint's Stephen
Who will go for my country?