Mars revisited: Nasa spacecraft days away from risky landing
InSight makes grand entrance Monday after a six-month, 48 million kilometre journey
Mars is about to get its first US visitor in years: a three-legged, onearmed geologist to dig deep and listen for quakes.
NASA’s InSight makes its grand entrance through the rose-tinted Martian skies on Monday, after a six-month, 300 million-mile (480 million-kilometer) journey. It will be the first American spacecraft to land since the Curiosity rover in 2012 and the first dedicated to exploring underground.
Nasa is going with a triedand-true method to get this mechanical miner to the surface of the red planet. Engine firings will slow its final descent and the spacecraft will plop down on its rigid legs, mimicking the landings of earlier successful missions. That’s where old school ends on this $1 billion (Dh3.67 billion) US-European effort.
Once landed, InSight’s 6-foot (1.8-meter) arm will remove the two main science experiments from the lander’s deck and place them directly on the Martian surface. No spacecraft has attempted anything like that before.
One experiment will attempt to penetrate 16 feet (5 meters) into Mars, using a self-hammering nail with heat sensors to gauge the planet’s internal temperature. That would shatter the out-ofthis-world depth record of 8 feet drilled by the Apollo moonwalkers nearly a half-century ago for lunar ■ heat measurements.
The astronauts also left behind instruments to measure moonquakes. InSight carries the first seismometers to monitor for marsquakes — if they exist. Yet another experiment will calculate Mars’ wobble, providing clues about the planet’s core.
But first, the 360-kilogram vehicle needs to get safely to the Martian surface.
InSight will enter Mars’ atmosphere at a supersonic 12,300mp/h (19,800km/h), relying on its white nylon parachute and a series of engine firings to slow down enough for a soft upright landing on Mars’ Elysium Planitia, a sizeable equatorial plain.