After successful Mars landing, scientists settle in for two-year mission

Flight team engineers Sue Smrekar, left, and Pauline Hwang celebrate at confirmation of the successful landing of the spacecraft mission to Mars.

an uneventful seven-month cruise, closed in on Mars over Thanksgiving weekend. That meant that engineers spent their holiday finessing the spacecraft’s final approach.

They checked and double-checked InSight’s trajectory, aiming it toward a 6-by-15-mile keyhole in the Martian atmosphere that would guide the vehicle toward a carefully chosen landing spot on the

ruddy surface.

Weather forecasts from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed that the outlook was sunny with a low chance of dust storms, so engineers skipped their last chance to tweak InSight’s landing procedure Monday morning. The pieces were in place; there was nothing more for Earthlings to do.

At 11:39 a.m., InSight screamed into the Martian atmosphere and, as expected, lost communication with Earth. A focused quiet fell over the rows of engineers in mission control at JPL, as everyone waited for signals confirming that InSight had made it through a series of crucial steps. Some hunched close to their computer screens, others glanced around for updates.

In this room, engineers have seen the delicate dance of entry, descent and landing go flawlessly — and fatally — on previous missions.

Unlike on previous missions, however, the InSight team had the benefit of two experimental satellites that tracked InSight’s progress. The Mars Cube One satellites, known as MarCOs, locked onto the spacecraft before it entered the Martian atmosphere and continuously relayed information back to mission control.

The signals were delayed by the eight minutes it