NASA’s InSight lander beams SELFIE back from Mars – ‘SAY CHEESE!’

The almost sci-fi image was beamed back from Mars to Earth and shows the robot in position on the dusty terrain. NASA said in a tweet alongside the photo: “Say Cheese! InSight’s first selfie on Mars reveals the lander’s solar panels and deck! “The spacecraft used a camera on its robotic arm to create a mosaic made up of 11 images. Take a peek at Insight’s first complete ‘workspace’.”

So far, the only images which are readily available to the public from InSight are of its instruments in front of the murky landscape.

This is because the lander has yet to fully deploy all of its tools, but the new images will let experts at the US space agency determine where to set InSight’s seismometer and heat flow probe, which they said was “the only instruments ever to be robotically placed on the surface of another planet”.

After a seven-month and 300million mile journey, NASA’s InSight lander finally arrived at Mars on November 26.

It is only now, however, the space agency is releasing some of the most outstanding images of Mars that have ever been seen.

InSight’s mission is to map the deep interior of Mars and Nasa is also planning a rover mission for 2020, to investigate signs of primitive life they believe exists under the surface.

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.

A second instrument, furnished by Germany’s space agency, consists of a drill to burrow as much as 16feet underground, pulling behind it a rope-like thermal probe to measure heat flowing from inside the planet.