This is Science Friday. I'm Iro Flato. A bit later in the hour, we'll take the temperature of the latest national climate assessment. But first, on Monday, Mars fans rejoiced as Mars insights stuck the landing on a large flat plane near the Martian equator. And in the days that followed, all signs are good.

The lander has deployed its solar panels.

It's begun to unsteo its robotic arm,

and scientists are planning where to place their instruments.

Joining me now to talk about that space feat and other short subjects in science

is Maggie Kerth Baker.

She's a senior science reporter for 538.

She joins me from the NPR, MPR studios.

Welcome back, Maggie.

Hi, thanks for having me.

This is kind of, you know, what's the lander, what's the mission of this lander?

Well, so Insight, which is a tortured acronym for interior exploration using seismic investigations, geodicy, and heat transport is designed to study geologic activity or lack thereof beneath the Martian soil.

So it's going to send dig down into the soil with probes?

Yep. And so you know how Earth has these plates of crust that move slowly,

crashing into each other, forming, reforming continents over millions of years? Well, it turns out that

Mars apparently doesn't have any of that. You know, the planet seems to be tectonically,

seems to have been tectonically active in its ancient past, but it isn't anymore, and nobody really knows why. No one knows what happened. They know that there are earthquakes on Mars, and insight is going to measure some of those, but those aren't even caused by plate tectonics there. Instead, they're caused by the crust cracking as the planet's interior cools and shrinks. And we don't even know if the planet's core is still molten or if it's

solidified. Wow, that is exciting to find out. The landing was marked by a couple of tiny

satellites that went along for the ride. Yeah, these little briefcase-sized cube sets that

launched at the same time as in sight and traveled kind of alongside of it so that when it was landing,

they were able to be flying by Mars and sending information back to Earth.

So it's not like relying on a satellite that already was in orbit.

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