Mars not kind to visitors

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Mars has a nasty habit of living up to its mythological name and besting Earth when it comes to accepting visitors.

NASA’s InSight is the latest spacecraft to come calling, with every intent of landing and digging deeper into the planet than anything that’s come before. The lander arrives at Mars on Monday following a sixmonth 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.

Landing on Mars is always risky, Grover and other experts stress at every opportunity.

“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,” he said,

The numbers back him up. Only about 40 percent of all missions to Mars — named after the Roman god of war — have succeeded.

“Going to Mars is really, really hard,” NASA’s top science mission official, Thomas Zurbuchen, told reporters earlier this week. “As humanity, the explorers all over the world, we’re batting about 50 percent — or less.”

The United States is the only country to successfully operate a spacecraft on the Martian surface. InSight represents NASA’s ninth attempt to put a spacecraft on Mars; only one effort failed.