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NASA’s Mars probe lands, immediately starts sending photos

It has taken the Mars lander more than six months to reach the red planet.

This illustration made available by NASA in October 2016 shows an illustration of NASA's InSight lander about to land on the surface of Mars.
This illustration made available by NASA in October 2016 shows an illustration of NASA's InSight lander about to land on the surface of Mars.Read moreNASA / JPL

NASA's InSight probe landed on Mars this afternoon to begin what scientists hope will be an inner examination of the red planet's crust, mantle and corps.

The first photos from the probe began flowing in just after 3 p.m.

NASA was broadcasting the landing live from inside Mission Control.

It took InSight (which is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) six months to get to Mars, traveling 301 million miles at a top speed of 6,200 mph.

NASA says studying Mars' interior structure will help answer "key questions about the early formation of rocky planets in our inner solar system — Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars – more than 4 billion years ago, as well as rocky exoplanets."

The lander also will measure tectonic activity and meteorite impacts on Mars in the present.

The final landing sequence was expected to take seven minutes — an especially tense time for NASA scientists — and since radio signals take more than eight minutes to travel between Mars and Earth, NASA did not know if it was successful until after the landing was actually over.