Nasa beats the odds with Mars landing
A Nasa spacecraft designed to drill down into Mars’ interior landed on the planet yesterday after a perilous, supersonic plunge through its red skies, setting off jubilation among scientists who had waited in white-knuckle suspense for confirmation to arrive across 160 million kilometres of space.
Flight controllers at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, leaped out of their chairs, screaming, dancing and hugging, upon learning that InSight had arrived on Mars, the graveyard for a multitude of previous missions.
‘‘Touchdown confirmed!’’ a flight controller called out just before 3pm EST, instantly dispelling the anxiety that had gripped the control room as the spacecraft made its six-minute descent.
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 journey.
The two satellites not only transmitted the good news in almost real time, they also sent back InSight’s first snapshot of Mars just 4 minutes after landing.
The picture was speckled with dirt because the dust cover was yet to be removed from the lander’s camera, but the terrain at first glance looked smooth and sandy with just one sizable rock visible – pretty much what scientists had hoped for. Better photos are expected in the days ahead.
It was Nasa’s – indeed, humanity’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.
‘‘Flawless,’’ declared JPL’s chief engineer, Rob Manning. ‘‘This is what we really hoped and imagined in our mind’s eye,’’ he added. ‘‘Sometimes things work out in your favour.’’
Nasa Administrator Jim Bridenstine, presiding over his first Mars landing as the space agency’s boss, said: ‘‘What an amazing day for our country.’’
InSight, part of a US$1 billion international mission, features a German-led mechanical mole that will burrow down 5 metres to measure the planet’s internal heat.
Nothing has ever dug deeper into Mars than several inches. The lander also has a French-made seismometer for measuring quakes, if they exist on our smaller, geologically calmer neighbour.
Another experiment will calculate Mars’ wobble to reveal the makeup of the planet’s core.
‘‘In the coming months and years even, history books will be rewritten about the interior of Mars,’’ said JPL’s director, Michael Watkins.
Many Mars-bound spacecraft launched by the U.S., Russia and other spacefaring countries have been lost or destroyed over the years, with a success rate of just 40 percent, not counting InSight.
Nasa went with its old, straightforward approach this time, using a parachute and braking engines to get InSight’s speed from 19,800kmh when it pierced the Martian atmosphere, about 114km up, to 8kmh at touchdown.
The danger was that the spacecraft could burn up in the atmosphere or bounce off it.