South Africa Daily

Los Angeles –  Anyone can now check the weather on the red planet with a few clicks thanks to a new tool unveiled by Nasa yesterday.

The space agency’s rover InSight is providing daily weather reports, which are then posted online, Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.

On Sunday, the highest temperature on Mars was a brisk -17ºC and the lowest reached a frigid -95ºC.

“It gives you a sense of visiting an alien place,” said Don Banfield of Cornell University, in New York’s Ithaca, who leads InSight’s weather science department. “Mars has familiar atmospheric phenomena that are still quite different than those on Earth.”

The Nasa spacecraft landed on Mars in November, becoming the first probe from the US civilian space programme to land on the red planet in six years.