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> 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> 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> 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.”

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• A lake on Mars? Discovery of liquid water below planet's surface stokes hopes of finding life </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> CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A robotic geologist armed with a hammer and quake monitor rocketed toward Mars on Saturday, May 5, aiming to land on the red planet and explore its mysterious insides.

In a twist, NASA launched the Mars InSight lander from California rather than Florida’s Cape Canaveral. It was the first interplanetary mission ever to depart from the West Coast, drawing pre-dawn crowds to fog-socked Vandenberg Air Force Base and rocket watchers down the California coast into Baja.

“This is a big day. We’re going back to Mars!” said NASA’s new boss, Jim Bridenstine. “This is an extraordinary mission with a whole host of firsts.”

The spacecraft will take more than six months to get to Mars and start its unprecedented geologic excavations, traveling 300 million miles (485 million kilometers) to get there.

JPL is managing the InSight project for NASA’s Discovery Program. The spacecraft, including cruise stage and lander, was built and tested by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver.

InSight will dig deeper into Mars than ever before — nearly 16 feet, or 5 meters — to take the planet’s temperature. It will also attempt to make the first measurements of marsquakes, using a high-tech seismometer placed directly on the Martian surface.

The Atlas V rocket also gave a lift to a pair of mini test satellites, or CubeSats, meant to trail InSight all the way to Mars and then serve as a potential communication link. They popped off the rocket’s upper stage in hot pursuit of InSight, as elated launch controllers applauded and shook hands following the morning’s success.

The $1 billion mission involves scientists from the U.S., France, Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

NASA hasn’t put a spacecraft down on Mars since the Curiosity rover in 2012. The U.S., in fact, is the only country to successfully land and operate a spacecraft at Mars. It’s tough, complicated stuff. Only about 40 percent of all missions to Mars from all countries — orbiters and landers alike — have proven successful over the decades.

If all goes well, the three-legged InSight will descend by parachute and engine firings onto a flat equatorial region of Mars — believed to be free of big, potentially dangerous rocks — on Nov. 26. Once down, it will stay put, using a mechanical arm to place the science instruments on the surface.

“This mission will probe the interior of another terrestrial planet, giving us an idea of the size of the core, the mantle, the crust and our ability then to compare that with the Earth,” said NASA’s chief scientist Jim Green. “This is of fundamental importance to understand the origin of our solar system and how it became the way it is today.”

InSight’s principal scientist, Bruce Banerdt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said Mars is ideal for learning how the rocky planets of our solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. Unlike our active Earth, Mars hasn’t been transformed by plate tectonics and other processes, he noted.

Over the course of two Earth years — or one Martian year — scientists expect InSight’s three main experiments to provide a true 3-D image of the interior of Mars.

The lander is equipped with a seismometer for measuring marsquakes, a self-hammering probe for burrowing beneath the surface, and a radio system for tracking the spacecraft’s position and planet’s wobbly rotation, thereby revealing the size and composition of Mars’ core.

“InSight, for seismologists, will really be a piece of history, a new page of history,” said the Paris Institute of Earth Physics’ Philippe Lognonne, lead scientist of the InSight seismometer.

Problems with the French-supplied seismometer kept InSight from launching two years ago. California was always part of the plan.

NASA normally launches from Cape Canaveral, but decided to switch to California for InSight to take advantage of a shorter flight backlog. This was the first U.S. interplanetary mission to launch from somewhere other than Cape Canaveral.

It was so foggy at Vandenberg that spectators there could hear and feel the roar and rumble of the rocket, but couldn’t see it. It was a marvelous sight, though, farther south. The rocket’s bright orange flame was visible for some time as it arced upward across the dark sky west of greater Los Angeles.

Not even two weeks on the job, NASA’s new administrator, Bridenstine, observed the launch on monitors at space agency headquarters in Washington.

“I can’t think of a better way to start my day!” Bridenstine tweeted.

Associated Press writer John Antczak in Pasadena, California, contributed to this report.

Historically, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, based in La Canada Flintridge, has launched its robotic missions to Mars out of Cape Canaveral.

A pair of briefcase-size satellites will launch aboard InSight, break free after liftoff, then follow the spacecraft for six months all the way to Mars. They won’t stop at Mars, just fly past.

PHOTOS: All systems go for InSight’s historic launch.

The launch didn’t cause the spectacular light show that set off awe (and some panic) during some previous Vandenberg launches, but early risers took to social media to share their glimpses.

In the predawn darkness, most viewers simply saw a tiny red or white dot inching along the horizon.

InSight is expected to land on Mars on Nov. 26. The $1 billion U.S.-European mission is dedicated to studying the innards of Mars, with a robotic geologist digging 15 feet into the Martian soil.

InSight’s goal: To capture the most precise measurements of images of the red planet ever. By measuring the planet’s seismic activity, JPL aims to document Mars’ interior structure and paint a sophisticate picture of the planet’s surface and infrastructure.

The part of the mission that delights Sci-Fi fans and space enthusiasts: Scientists hope the seismic waves could reveal underground pockets of water — and perhaps even locate sites where life of some sort could be possible. </s> There are earthquakes and moonquakes, and now a NASA spacecraft has detected what's believed to be a "marsquake" on the Red Planet.

NASA's InSight lander, which touched down on Mars in November after a seven-month journey, sensed the seismic signal on April 6, the space agency said Tuesday.

Mission scientists are still working to confirm the source of the faint trembling, though it appears to have come not from the wind or movement of the lander's robotic arm but from below the Martian surface. If confirmed, it would be the first seismic activity ever detected on Mars.

"We've been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology!" Bruce Banerdt, a geologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the principal investigator of the InSight mission, said in a statement.

The 800-pound lander is parked on the Elysium Planitia, a broad, mostly rock-free plain just north of the Martian equator. The lander is designed to operate on the surface of Mars for two years, learning about the Martian interior as a way to boost our understanding of the formation of Mars and other rocky worlds, including Mercury, Venus, Earth and the moon.

The detection of the marsquake shows that the lander's Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) seismometer is working, though the tremor was too small to reveal anything about the Martian interior. But mission scientists expect the lander to detect more — and bigger — quakes.

"We expect to get one quake larger by a factor 10 approximately every 5-10 quakes," Philippe Lognonné, a professor of geophysics and planetary science at the University of Paris Diderot and the leader of the seismometer team, said in an email. "These larger quakes will be those enabling us to make the full science we want to make on the internal structure, and which will tell us the crust thickness and core size. Not this one."

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SIGN UP FOR THE MACH NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND INSTAGRAM. </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.”

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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.

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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> 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.