NASA’s InSight beams pictures from Mars
Minutes after touching down on Mars, NASA’s InSight spacecraft sent back a “nice and dirty” snapshot of its new digs. Yet the dust-speckled image looked like a work of art to scientists.
The photo revealed a mostly smooth and sandy terrain around the spacecraft with only one sizable rock visible. “I’m very, very happy that it looks like we have an incredibly safe and boring landing location,” project manager Tom Hoffman said after Monday’s touchdown. “That’s exactly what we were going for.”
A better image came hours later and more are expected in the days ahead, after the dust covers come off the lander’s cameras.
The spacecraft arrived at Mars after a perilous, supersonic plunge through its red skies that took just six minutes. “Touchdown confirmed!” a flight controller called out just before 3 pm local time, setting off jubilation among scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who had waited in white-knuckle suspense for word to reach across 160 million kilometres of space.
It was NASA’s eighth successful landing at Mars since the 1976 Viking probes, and the first in six years. NASA’s Curiosity rover, which arrived in 2012, is still on the move on Mars.
Because of the distance between Earth and Mars, it took eight minutes for confirmation to arrive, relayed by a pair of tiny satellites that had been trailing InSight throughout the sixmonth, 482-million-kilometre journey.
“Flawless,” declared JPL’s chief engineer, Rob Manning. “Sometimes things work out in your favour.”
InSight, a $1 billion international project, includes a German mechanical mole that will burrow down 5 metres to measure Mars’ internal heat.
The lander also has a French seismometer for measuring quakes, if they exist on our smaller, geologically calmer neighbor.
Another experiment will calculate Mars’ wobble to reveal the makeup of the planet’s core.