Professor Mark Sims on the discovery that Beagle 2 made it to the surface

A robot arm aboard NASA’s InSight Mars lander has completed deployment of a sensitive French-built seismometer and its critical wind and thermal shield.

Liquid water existing on the surface of Mars, in the here and now, has been the holy grail of Martian exploration for some time, but in October 2015 NASA announced that the orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) had turned water-diviner to find compelling evidence that water is bursting out onto the red surface and trickling down the slopes of crater walls and hillsides.

Gigantic groundwater outbursts created the largest flood channels in the solar system on Mars, 3.2 billion years ago. For many years it was thought that this was caused by the release of water from a global water table, but research just published reveals regional deposits of sediment and ice emplaced 450 million years earlier to be the source.