NASA’s InSight explorer lands safely on Mars
Spacecraft will operate for two years probing the Red Planet’s interior
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 on 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 that InSight will uncover signs of 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 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.
It was NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine’s first landing as head of the agency.
“This was an amazing, amazing day,” he said at a news conference Monday afternoon. “To be in the room when the data stops and to know how quiet it gets ... and then once the data comes back, the elation.”
Principal investigator Bruce Banerdt began his career as an intern at JPL on the Viking mission, the first successful Mars landing. Seeing the initial grainy image from InSight felt like “coming full circle,” he said. It was an early glimpse at a place on the brink of being explored.
Through the debris covering its camera’s dust cover, InSight captured a small rock (not expected to cause any problems for the science) and the edge of its own foot. Off in the distance, Mars’ horizon looms.
“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 Red Planet’s rusty surface is what scientists call “the seven minutes of terror.”
More than half of all missions don’t make it safely to the surface. Because it takes more than seven minutes for light 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.
“Every milestone is something that happened eight minutes ago,” Bridenstine said. “It’s already history.”
The mission’s objective is to determine what Mars is made of and how it has changed since it formed more than four billion years ago. The results could help solve the mystery of how it became the dry, desolate world we know it as today.