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- NASA's InSight Mars satellite will attempt to land on Monday night.
- The robotic probe could be the first Martian mission to measure the "vital signs" of the world and to decode its internal structure.
- From tsunamis the size of a skyscraper to blue sunsets, here are some surprising facts about the red planet that you may not know..
NASA is about to land at InSight: a new $ 830 million lander to explore the secrets of the red planet like never before.
InSight started in May and is expected to land on Monday, but it's only about a dozen robotic and satellite missions that mankind has propelled on Mars over the decades.
These spacecraft transmitted dazzling photos, inspired sci-fi movies like "The Martian", and even helped give Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, the idea of colonizing the Red Planet with the Big One. Falcon Rocket.
Scientists readily admit that they have much to learn from Mars, including the internal structure of the planet (a mystery that InSight will attempt to solve), but what we have discovered so far It's incredible.
Here are 13 fascinating facts about Mars and our robotic exploration of the red planet.
volcanoes
Olympus Mons is more than twice as high as the Mauna Loa in Hawaii, the highest mountain in the world.
canyons
Compared to the Grand Canyon on Earth, Valles Marineris on Mars is almost five times deeper, about four times longer and 20 times wider.
March tremors
The red planet has no plate tectonics, which is responsible for most earthquakes on Earth. But rising magma plumes could trigger earthquakes on Mars, as well as meteorite impacts and contraction of the world due to cooling. InSight will listen with his seismometer.
The oases
If aliens existed on Mars, they might have lived in pools that looked like oases. These pools would have been habitable for life, just like on Earth.
tsunamis
The Martian oceans have also had tsunamis like those of the Earth. The largest may have reached 123 m.
Ice caps
Like Earth, Mars has ice caps at its poles. The northern cap has a maximum depth of 3.2 km. It is composed of water and carbon dioxide and covers an area about half that of South Africa.
Temperature
The average surface temperature on Mars is -63 degrees Celsius, 138 degrees lower than on Earth. But a mid-summer day at the equator of the Red Planet, temperatures can peak at around 35 degrees Celsius.
Oceans
Billions of years ago, Mars had oceans and white water. But adding them would only give you 1.5% of all water on Earth today.
Area
Mars has almost as much surface area as the Earth has – but that does not represent the 71% of the Earth covered with water.
Atmosphere
The Martian atmosphere is 61 times thinner than Earth's and it is almost entirely composed of carbon dioxide, which represents only 0.04% of the Earth's atmosphere.
Sunsets
On Earth, sunsets are a brilliant mix of reds, pinks, oranges, yellows and other colors. But on Mars, they are blue. Since the air is tens of times less dense on the surface of Mars than on our planet, the white light of the sun refracts less, giving fewer colors (mainly blue).
Launch rate
Mars missions have become much rarer. After 23 launches in the 1960s and 1970s, we only launched 10 in the new millennium (so far). This number does not include InSight.
Missions
Arriving on Mars is difficult: about a third of launched missions have failed.
NASA hopes to add InSight to the "success" column on November 26.
This story has been updated. It was published on June 1, 2017.
Skye Gould and Diana Yukari contributed to this post and Meghan Bartels wrote an earlier version.
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