The latest Mars mission lit up the internet faster than a comet Monday with remarkable images coming from the red planet, but what does the latest mission mean?       

News 12 went to the Hudson River Museum's planetarium to find out.

Marc Taylor, who manages the planetarium and science programs at the museum in Yonkers, says the mission is meant to explore a part of Mars that we don't know much about - the inside.

"We have not before had the ability to find out what's going on inside Mars,” he says.

But now we just might. After seven months of traveling through space, NASA's Insight mission landed on Mars and the spacecraft even beamed down a photo showing the Martian surface.

"This helps us simply understand more of just how the world works,” says Taylor. “It helps understand more of how the planets form, including the Earth. It helps us understand how life on Earth originated."

NASA says its mission on Mars will take approximately two years, but maybe more. Will we know if life existed on Mars by November 2020? Time will tell.