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The six-month journey of a NASA spacecraft on Mars has reached its dramatic climax: it lands on the flat plains of the red planet.
The InSight lander landed just before 9am (NZT), the culmination of a billion dollar international effort.
The perilous descent of InSight through the Martian atmosphere, after a journey of 482 million kilometers, has had stomach upset and nerves stretched to the fullest. Although he was an old pro, NASA tried to land on Mars six years ago.
NASA
First image of the Mars surface of InSight, with dust spots covering the lens since landing.
The robotic geologist – designed to explore the mysterious interiors of Mars – has gone from 19,800 km / h to zero in six minutes flat, piercing the Martian atmosphere, pulling out a parachute, pulling his downhill motors and landing on three legs.
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"Landing on Mars is one of the hardest jobs that people have to do in planetary exploration," said InSight senior scientist Bruce Banerdt.
"It's so difficult, it's so dangerous that there's always a pretty uncomfortable chance that something is not right."
The success rate of the Earth on Mars is 40%, considering each attempt at overflight, orbital flight and landing carried out by the United States, Russia and other countries since 1960.
But the United States has managed seven landings on Mars over the last four decades. With only one hit missed, it's an enviable record. No other country has managed to install and operate a spacecraft on a dusty red surface.
NASA / JPL-CALTECH
A rendering of InSight that goes through the atmosphere of Mars.
InSight gave Nasa its eighth win.
The InSight team is hoping filming took place for Elysium Planitia, a plain near the Martian equator, as flat as a parking lot in Kansas, with little or no rocks.
This is not a rock collecting expedition. Instead, the stationary 360-kilogram undercarriage will use its 1.8-meter robotic arm to place a mechanical mole and seismometer on the ground.
NASA / JPL-CALTECH
The InSight lander on Mars … if everything goes as planned.
The self-hammering mole will dig a 5-meter burrow to measure the planet's internal heat, while the ultramodern seismometer will be on the lookout for possible earthquakes.
Our smaller neighbor, located nearly 160 million kilometers away, has not tried anything like this yet.
No experiments have ever been robotically moved from the probe to the actual Martian surface. No lander has dug more than several inches and no seismometer has ever worked on Mars.
By examining the deepest and darkest interior of Mars – still preserved from its earliest days – scientists hope to create 3D images that could reveal how the rock planets of our solar system were formed there are 4.5 billion years ago and why they turned out so different.
One of the big questions is what made the Earth so welcoming to life.
Mars had formerly rivers and lakes; deltas and lake bottoms are now dry and the planet is cold. Venus is an oven because of its thick and jarring atmosphere. Mercury, the closest to the sun, has a positively cooked surface.
The global know-how gained through the two years of InSight's operation could even extend to rocky worlds beyond our solar system, according to Banerdt.
The discoveries on Mars could help explain the kind of conditions present in these so-called "exoplanets" and their integration into history as we try to understand how planets are formed, "he said.
Focusing on planetary building blocks, InSight has no life detection capability. This will be left for future rovers. The NASA Mars 2020 mission, for example, will collect rocks that could possibly contain evidence of ancient life.
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