Nasa hopes to beat the odds with new Mars probe United States
Mars has a nasty habit of living up to its mythological name and besting Earth when it comes to accepting visitors. Nasa’s InSight lander is the latest spacecraft to come calling, with every intention of digging deeper into the red planet than anything that’s come before after arriving there tomorrow, following a six-month journey.
‘‘We’ve had a number of successful landings in a row now. But you never know what Mars will throw at you,’’ said Rob Grover, lead engineer for the landing team at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
‘‘Our job on the landing team is to be paranoid about what could go wrong and make sure that we’re doing everything we can to make sure things go right.’’
The numbers back him up. Only about 40 per cent of all missions to Mars – named after the Roman god of war – have succeeded.
‘‘Going to Mars is really, really hard,’’ said Nasa’s top science mission official, Thomas Zurbuchen. ‘‘We’re batting about 50 per cent – or less.’’
The US is the only country to successfully operate a spacecraft on the Martian surface. InSight is Nasa’s ninth attempt to put a spacecraft on Mars; only one effort failed.
The last one, the Curiosity rover, is still on the move after six years, with more than 20km on its odometer. The US space agency’s older, smaller Opportunity rover was roaming around until June, when a massive dust storm knocked it out of service. Flight controllers haven’t given up hope that it will be revived.
There’s a heavy European presence on InSight. Germany is in charge of the mechanical mole designed to burrow 5m into the Martian surface to take underground heat measurements, while France is directing the lander’s earthquake-monitoring seismometer.
Curiosity is currently the only machine operating on the Martian surface. In orbit are the US Odyssey probe (since 2001), Europe’s Mars Express (2003), the US Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (2006), the US Maven probe (2014), India’s Mangalyaan orbiter (2014), and Europe’s Trace Gas Orbiter (2016).