Insight will be landing on Mars today. Will you be watching? Is this a wonderful thing or a waste of money and resources?

Wonderful thing. Research is a wonderful thing. There are so many benefits for our everyday lives from space research.
https://www.businessinsider.com/everyday-items-developed-by-nasa-2012-8
And this quickly gotten link is from 2012. How much more have we learned since then?

And really, MARS!!! How cool is that???

A shame that we have been moving so slowly on stuff like this. Man should have been on Mars already.

Great to explore.

There are things that I consider a waste of money and resources.
The annual, incremental iterations of smartphones, for example.
Landing a probe on Mars is not among those.

The physical resources used are minimal. The cost of the materials is minimal

Every penny of the money spent is still here on earth, providing jobs for engineers, scientists, chemists, machinists, lab janitors, everybody who did anything to harvest the materials used to build the devices, etc

Knowledge is priceless. The potential dividends are enormous.

Wonderful thing.

Education and learning is priceless.

A great wonderful thing! Spending 200 million dollars deploying military at the border for political gain, that’s a waste.

Super ,as long as it rakes up where it has been ,never to careful you know.

Wonderful!
I’ll be watching and sucking up every word! If you have a Roku you can watch it on the NASA channel. They have really good coverage going already.

Or watch it here:NASA InSight Mission

I’m at work but hope to catch it on ABC news with David Muir tonight. Actually, I just want to catch David Muir, no matter what news event he talks about. :-)

BTW, what is the purpose of this mission? We, and the Russians, have been sending probes to Mars since 1962. Or trying to, at least. We managed to do it sucessfully for the first time in 1964. And there have been several more since then.

Listening live…..

This is interesting

Touchdown confirmed!

Martians now have insight about Earthlings.

I watched. It’s beautiful. Watching people work constructively is a wonderful break from what fill the news otherwise.

And the science they are going to do is groundbreaking (get it?)

A small step for a machine, a giant leap for machinekind.

C) It’s not a waste, but no I didn’t watch. May watch later.

Ha ha @Caravanfan. So…what are they going to do that hasn’t already been done?

They are drilling down from the surface. Thus, groundbreaking!

I got that. Has no other mission to Mars ever done that? Are they looking for something that noone else has looked for?

Don’t get me wrong…I love space exploration. I am just curious about the purpose of this particular mission.

Martians, @Dutchess_III! They are looking for martians! :-)

I think they are just on a fact finding mission. If there is water, what kind of rocks and dirt, etc.

@Dutchess_III: Google is your friend!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/InSight

@Dutchess_III
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/insight

Well that ^^^ was sure funner than mine!

I am wondering if this rover can do something that the rovers that are currently up there,
Opportunity (lost contact in the June 2018 dust storm) and Curiosity can not or have not. Curiosity showed that Mars probably did have water at one point, and could have supported microbial life.
Anyway, gotta run.

It’s not a rover. It’s a stationary platform for seismology and radio range-finding (kind of like GPS). It’s monitoring seismic activity, digging down into the soil 15 feet, and providing a stable target for measuring the movement through space of Mars.

NASA’s InSight Will Probe Mars’ Quakes, Temperature and Wobble to Understand Its Origins

Thank you @Call_Me_Jay.
I love that website!