Nasa insight landed 4 degrees tilted on Mars

Veteran leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador assumes the Mexican presidency on Saturday vowing to champion the poor and contain business elites he says have conspired with politicians for years to fuel corruption and lawlessness.

After a busy five-month transition that has spooked financial markets, Lopez Obrador will take responsibility for fixing escalating gang violence, chronic poverty and widespread discontent with the political class in Mexico.

To do that, the anti-establishment former Mexico City mayor plans to increase pensions, create a militarized Guardia Nacional nationwide police force, change the penal code to amnesty lesser criminals, and hold referendums to back his policies.

An admirer of Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas, who nationalized Mexico’s oil industry in 1938, Lopez Obrador will be the first leftist to run the country since it began moving from one-party rule towards democracy in the 1980s.

Thanks to a landslide victory and a coalition that controls both houses of Congress, he enters office as one of the most powerful presidents in decades.

The 65-year-old took a conciliatory approach to investors during the campaign, but has struggled to reconcile deeplyheld personal ideals with his pragmatic acknowledgment that he needs a stable economy and investment to achieve his goals. He also wants to improve ties with U.S. President Donald Trump by crafting a deal to contain migration from Central America in exchange for U.S. aid to help develop the violent, impoverished region.

“Mexico is going to be a safe country, a country that really encourages investment,” he said in a video address this week, promising his inauguration speech would be business-friendly. But also this week, he stepped up threats to unpick outgoing President Enrique Pena Nieto’s agenda, slamming the latter’s “neo-liberal” opening of the oil industry to foreign capital. The months since the election have been a white-knuckle ride for investors. Markets gyrated to abrupt decisions backed by what Lopez Obrador calls participatory democracy, but what critics see as autocratic populism. On 29 October, he canceled a $13 billion new Mexico City airport, alleging a taint of corruption, leading investors to dump shares, bonds and the peso currency.

Though it has since pared some of those losses, the Mexican bourse is still close to three-year lows. WASHINGTON: Though NASA’s InSight landed safely on the surface of Mars, but the spacecraft sits about 4 degrees tilted, the US space agency said.

Early last week, InSight touched down on a lava plain named Elysium Planitia on the Red Planet.

The vehicle sits tilted slightly in a shallow dust-and sand-filled impact crater known as a “hollow”. But, InSight has been engineered to operate on a surface with an inclination up to 15 degrees, NASA said in a statement on Friday. “The science team had been hoping to land in a sandy area with few rocks since we chose the landing site, so we couldn’t be happier,” said InSight project manager Tom Hoffman at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California.

“There are no landing pads or runways on Mars, so coming down in an area that is basically a large sandbox without any large rocks should make instrument deployment easier and provide a great place for our mole to start burrowing,” he added. Rockiness and slope grade factor into landing safety and are also important in determining whether InSight can succeed in its mission after landing. According to the team, rocks and slopes could affect InSight’s ability to place its heat-flow probe— also known as “the mole” or HP3—and ultra-sensitive seismometer, known as SEIS, on the surface of Mars. But, a preliminary assessment of the photographs taken so far of the landing area suggests the area in the immediate vicinity of the lander is populated by only a few rocks. Higher-resolution images are expected to begin arriving over the coming days, after InSight releases the clear-plastic dust covers that kept the optics of the spacecraft’s two cameras safe during landing.

“We are looking forward to higher-definition pictures to confirm this preliminary assessment,” said JPL’s Bruce Banerdt, principal investigator of InSight. “If these few images—with resolutionreducing dust covers on—are accurate, it bodes well for both instrument deployment and the mole penetration of our subsurface heat-flow experiment.” Data downlinked from the lander also indicate that during its first full day on Mars, the solar-powered InSight spacecraft generated more electrical power than any previous vehicle on the surface of Mars, NASA noted.