Nasa’s latest Mars craft nears landing

Nasa’s first spacecraft built to explore the deep interior of another world streaked towards a landing scheduled for yesterday on a vast, barren plain on Mars, carrying instruments to detect planetary heat and seismic rumblings never measured anywhere but Earth.

After sailing 548 million km on a six-month voyage through deep space, the robotic lander Insight was due to touch down on the dusty, rock-strewn surface of the Red Planet at about 3pm. EST.

If all goes according to plan, Insight will hurtle through the top of the thin Martian atmosphere at 19,310 km/h.

Slowed by friction, deployment of a giant parachute and retro rockets, Insight will descend 123 km through pink Martian skies to the surface in 6 1/2 minutes, travelling a mere 8km/h by the time it lands.

The stationary probe, launched in May from California, will then pause for 16 minutes for the dust to settle, literally, around its landing site, before disc-shaped solar panels are unfurled like wings to provide power to the spacecraft.

The site is roughly 600km from the 2012 landing spot of the car-sized Mars rover Curiosity, the last spacecraft sent to the Red Planet by Nasa.

The smaller, 360kg Insight — its name is short for Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — marks the 21st US-launched Mars missions, dating back to the Mariner fly-bys of the 1960s. Nearly two dozen other Mars missions have been sent from other nations.

Insight will spend 24 months — about one Martian year — using seismic monitoring and underground temperature readings to unlock mysteries about how Mars formed and, by extension, the origins of the Earth and other rocky planets of the inner solar system.