NASA PROBE LANDS SAFELY ON MARS.
LATEST MARS PROBE MAY SHOW HOW RED PLANET BECAME A DESERT
For the eighth time ever, humanity has achieved one of the toughest tasks in the solar system: landing a spacecraft on Mars.
The InSight lander, operated by NASA and built by scientists in the U.S., France and Germany, touched down in the vast, red expanse of Mars’ Elysium Planitia just before 3 p.m. ET Monday
There it will operate for the next two Earth years, deploying a seismometer, a heat sensor and radio antenna to probe the red planet’s interior. Scientists hope InSight will uncover tectonic activity and clues about the planet’s past. Those findings could illuminate how Mars became the desolate desert world we see today.
Mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., erupted in laughter, applause, hugs and tears as soon as the lander touched down.
“That was awesome,” one woman said, wiping her eyes and clasping her colleague’s hand. A few minutes later, a splotchy red and brown image appeared on the control room’s main screen — InSight’s first photograph from its new home.
“This thing has a lot more to do,” said entry, descent and landing systems engineer Rob Grover. “But just getting to the surface of Mars is no mean feat.”
The interminable stretch from the moment a spacecraft hits the Martian atmosphere to the second it touches down on the surface is what scientists call “the seven minutes of terror.”
Landing a spacecraft on Mars is as difficult as it sounds. More than half of all missions don’t make it safely to the surface. Because it takes more than seven minutes for signals to travel 100 million miles to Earth, scientists have no control over the process. All they can do is program the spacecraft with their best technology and wait.
The tension was palpable Monday morning in the control room at JPL, where InSight was built and will be operated. At watch parties around the globe — NASA headquarters in Washington, the Nasdaq tower in Times Square, the Museum of Sciences and Industry in Paris, a public library in Haines, Alaska, — legs jiggled and fingers were crossed as minutes ticked toward the beginning of entry, descent and landing.
At about 11:47 a.m., engineers received a signal indicating InSight had entered the Martian atmosphere. The spacecraft plummeted to the planet’s surface at a pace of 12,300 miles per hour. Within two minutes, the friction roasted InSight’s heat shield to a blistering 2,700 degrees. In another two minutes, a supersonic parachute deployed to help slow down the spacecraft. Radar was powered on.
From there, the most critical descent checklist unfolded at a rapid clip: 15 seconds to separate the heat shield. Ten seconds to deploy the legs. Activate the radar. Jettison the back shell. Fire the retrorockets. Orient for landing.
At 12:01 p.m., scientists heard a tiny X-band radio beep — a signal InSight is functioning on the planet.
“Flawless,” Grover said. “Flawless. This is what we really hoped and imagined in our minds eye.”
The mission’s objective is to determine what Mars is made of and how it has changed since it formed more than 4 billion years ago. The results could help solve the mystery of how the red planet became the dry, desolate world we know it as today.
Early in its history, Mars may have looked a lot like Earth. Magnetization in ancient rocks suggest it had a global magnetic field like that of Earth, powered by a churning mantle and metallic core. The field would have protected the planet from radiation, allowing an atmosphere much thicker than the one that exists now. This, in turn, likely enabled liquid water. Images from satellites reveal the outlines of long-gone lakes, deltas and river-carved canyons.
But the last 3 billion years have been a slow-motion disaster for the red planet. The dynamo died, the magnetic field faltered, the water evaporated and more than half of the atmosphere was stripped away by solar winds. The InSight mission is designed to find out why.
There is no orbiting spacecraft in the right position around Mars to relay real time information about InSight’s entry descent and landing back to Earth. But as InSight makes its precarious descent, NASA hoped to learn about its status via the MarCo satellites — tiny twin experimental spacecraft known as CubeSats that accompanied the lander on its flight to Mars. Each has solar arrays, a colour camera and an antenna for relaying communications from the Martian surface back to Earth.
About 10 minutes before landing, the control room at JPL erupted in applause — both MarCo satellites were working.
“That means the team now can watch the data flowing on to their screens,” said Grover.
Success during this mission may provide “a possible model for a new kind of interplanetary communications relay,” systems engineer Anne Marinan said in a NASA release last week.
NASA should know whether the lander’s solar arrays have deployed by Monday evening, thanks to recordings from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The agency also will get its first clear images of the spacecraft’s landing site — a vast, flat, almost featureless plain known as Elysium Planitia.
“Then the mission really will start,” said Jim Green, NASA’s chief scientist.
Unlike Opportunity and Curiosity, the rovers that trundle across Mars in search of interesting rocks, InSight is designed to sit and listen. Using its dome-shaped seismic sensor, scientists hope to detect tiny tremors associated with meteorite impacts, dust storms and “marsquakes” generated by the cooling of the planet’s interior. InSight also has a drill capable of burrowing 16 feet — deeper than any Mars instrument. From there, it can take Mars’s temperature to determine how much heat is still flowing out of the body of the planet. Meanwhile, two antennae will precisely track the lander’s location to determine how much Mars wobbles as it orbits the sun.
CAN WATCH THE DATA FLOWING ON TO THEIR SCREENS.