NASA announced that it had landed on Mars on the InSight satellite

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) – A NASA spacecraft designed to bury itself beneath the surface of Mars landed on the red planet Monday after a six-month trip and 300 million miles (482 million kilometers) downhill minute through the atmosphere tinged with pink.

After anxiously awaiting confirmation of their arrival in space, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory flight controllers in Pasadena, California, jumped out of their seats and burst into shouts, applause and fears. bursts of laughter when they learned that the three legged spaceship leg had landed successfully.

People kissed, shook hands, exchanged high-fives, raised their fists, wiped their tears and danced in the aisles.

"Flawless," said Rob Manning, chief engineer of JPL.

"That's what we really hoped and imagined in our minds," he said. "Sometimes things work in your favor."

Two mini-satellites in InSight since their take-off in May provided virtually real-time updates of the supersonic descent of the spacecraft through the reddish sky.

A quick photo sent from the surface of Mars was tainted with debris on the camera cover, but showed a flat surface with little or no rocks – exactly what scientists hoped for. Better images will arrive in the hours and days ahead.

A NASA spacecraft designed to bury itself beneath the surface of Mars landed on the red planet Monday after a six-month journey and 300 million miles and a six-minute perilous descent through the atmosphere tinged with pink. (November 26)

"What a relief," Manning said. "It's really fantastic." He added, "Wow! It never gets old.

InSight, a billion-dollar international company, has reached the surface after going 12,300 mph (19,800 km / h) to zero in six flat-minutes, using a parachute and engines. braking. The radio signals confirming the landing took more than eight minutes to cross the approximately 160 million kilometers between Mars and Earth.

Television broadcasts of the activity inside the JPL control room were held from coast to coast to coast in museums, planetariums and libraries, as well as Times Square in New York.

The last time NASA landed on Mars in 2012 with the Curiosity rover.

"Landing on Mars is one of the most difficult jobs people have to do in global exploration," said InSight senior scientist Bruce Banerdt before Monday's success. "It's so difficult, it's so dangerous that there is always a very good chance that something is not going well."

Mars has been the cemetery of a multitude of space missions. So far, the success rate on the Red Planet was only 40%, considering all attempts at overflight, orbital flight, and landing by the United States, Russia, and others. countries with space systems since 1960.

The United States has, however, made seven landings on Mars over the last four decades, not counting InSight, with only one touchdown. No other country has managed to install and use even a single spacecraft on a dusty surface.

InSight fired for Elysium Planitia, a plain near the Martian equator, which the InSight team hopes to be as flat as a parking lot in Kansas.

The 360-pound (360-kilogram) fixed lander will use its 6-foot robotic arm to place a mechanical mole and seismometer on the ground. The self-hammering mole digs 5 meters (16 feet) to measure the internal heat of the planet, while the seismometer listens to possible earthquakes.

No lander has dug deeper on Mars than several inches and no seismometer has ever worked on the planet.

Germany is responsible for InSight's mole, while France is responsible for the seismometer.

French Space Agency project director Philippe Laudet told JPL that, now that the seismometer is on Mars, a "new adventure" begins.

By examining the inside of Mars, scientists hope to understand how the rocky planets of our solar system were formed 4.5 billion years ago and why they turned out so different: cold and dry Mars, Venus and Mercury burning and Earth conducive to life.

InSight however has no life detection capability. These will be left to the attention of future rovers, such as NASA's Mars 2020 mission, which will collect rocks that will eventually be brought back to Earth and badyzed for traces of ancient life.