--- title: NASA's Mars InSight Lander Releases First Photo: See It Here description: Just moments after landing on Mars, the InSight spacecraft beamed home its first image from the Martian surface canonical: https://time.com/5463876/mars-insight-first-picture/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-11-26T21:30:26.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-23T22:07:52.054Z article:section: Science og:title: Here Is the First Picture from NASA's Mars InSight Lander og:description: Once again, a NASA Mars ship gets where it's going og:url: https://time.com/5463876/mars-insight-first-picture/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbe7c316ba35677cc/69893ff5457a526f0bd5ffb4/screen-shot-2018-11-26-at-3-12-30-pm.png?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Mars Insight shares first photo og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Here Is the First Picture from NASA's Mars InSight Lander twitter:description: Once again, a NASA Mars ship gets where it's going twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltbe7c316ba35677cc/69893ff5457a526f0bd5ffb4/screen-shot-2018-11-26-at-3-12-30-pm.png?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Here Is the First Picture from NASA's Mars InSight Lander  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Nov 26, 2018 9:30 PM UTC  NASA Mars InSight NASA Mars InSightNASA's Mars Insight shared its first photo from the red planet just minutes after landing.  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Nov 26, 2018 9:30 PM UTC It isn’t pretty—nothing at all like the gallery of pictures that are sure to come. But [just moments after landing](http://time.com/5459942/insight-mars-nasa-landing/)—plus the eight minutes and seven seconds it takes for a radio signal to travel from Mars to Earth—the InSight spacecraft beamed home its first image from the Martian surface. [InSight’s own Twitter feed](https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1067147649386598400) explained the poor quality of the image: “My lens cover isn’t off yet, but I had to show you a first look at my new home.” The dark flecks in the image that resemble nothing so much as bacteria on a microscope slide are dust and debris kicked up by the lander’s engines, clinging to the semi-transparent cover. A bit of the spacecraft itself—likely one of its three foot-pads—is visible at the center bottom. InSight is equipped with two cameras: the one that produced this picture is on the main body of the spacecraft and captures fish-eye images, which maximizes the field of vision for close-up work. The other, mounted on the robotic arm, is the one that will provide full-color panoramic imagery with a field of view of about 45 degrees. > [](https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1067147649386598400) What counts most at the moment though is that InSight is precisely where it’s supposed to be—on Mars’s Elysium plain, just north of the equator; and that it’s there precisely when it was supposed to be—205 days after its May 5 launch. The spacecraft covered 270 million miles from the coast of California to get where it was going and operated flawlessly throughout. America isn’t good at everything; but we’re very, very good at Mars—and that is, and very much ought to be, a source of national uplift. **Correction, Nov. 27:** _The original version of this story misstated the launch site of NASA’s InSight lander. 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