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NASA 's first spacecraft built to explore the deep interior of another world landed on a vast arid plain on Monday, carrying instruments to detect planetary heat and seismic rumbling noise. have never been measured as on Earth.
After traveling 548 million kilometers during a six-month journey into deep space, the InSight robotic lander sits on the dusty, rock-covered surface of the red planet around 3 o'clock in the afternoon. EST (2000 GMT).
WATCH BELOW: The stakes are high for the landing of Mars InSight
InSight crossed the summit of the thin Martian atmosphere at 19,310 kilometers at the hour. Slow down by friction, the deployment of a giant parachute and retro rockets, InSight traveled 124 kilometers to the surface forming a pink Martian sky in 6 and a half minutes, traveling only 8 kilometers per hour.
The stationary probe, launched in May from California, paused for 16 minutes to allow dust to settle literally around its landing site, before disc-shaped solar panels unfolded like wings to power the spacecraft.
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The concern accentuates as the Mars InSight satellite prepares to land on the red planet on Monday
The mission control team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles hoped to receive real-time confirmation of the arrival of the spacecraft from data relayed by a pair of miniature satellites launched with InSight and having to fly over Mars.
The JPL controllers should also receive a picture of the new probe environment on the smooth, martian plain near the planet's equator, called Elysium Planitia.
The site is about 600 kilometers from the 2012 landing point of the car size rover robot, Curiosity, the latest spacecraft sent to the red planet by NASA.
WATCH BELOW: InSight will study the interior of Mars
InSight, a smaller 360 kilograms – its name is the abbreviation of Inner Intelligence, Seismic Exploration, Geodesy and Heat Transport – marks the 21st Mars missions launched by the United States, going back to the overflight of Mariner in the 1960s. Nearly two dozen other missions on Mars were sent by other countries.
InSight will spend 24 months – about a Martian year – using seismic monitoring and underground temperature readings to unravel the mysteries of the Mars formation and, by extension, the Earth's origins and other rocky planets of the system. internal solar.
While Earth's tectonics and other forces have erased most of the early evidence, much of Mars – about a third of its size – would have remained largely static, creating a geological time machine for the scientists.
WATCH BELOW: Why NASA sent InSight to Mars
The main instrument of InSight is a French-made seismometer, designed to record the smallest vibrations caused by "marsquakes" and meteor impacts across the planet. The device, which must be placed on the surface by the robotic arm of the undercarriage, is so sensitive that it can measure a seismic wave at half the radius of a hydrogen atom.
Scientists expect to see a dozen to 100 marsquakes during the mission, producing data to infer the depth, density and composition of the planet's core, the surrounding rocky mantle and of the outermost layer, the crust.
WATCH BELOW: Rover discovers the basics of life on Mars
NASA's Viking probes of the mid-1970s were also equipped with seismometers, but they were bolted to the top of the landing gear, a design that proved largely ineffective.
The Apollo missions on the Moon also brought seismometers to the lunar surface. But InSight should provide the first useful data on planetary seismic tremors beyond the Earth.
InSight is also equipped with a German-made drill for digging up to 5 meters underground, pulling behind it a rope-shaped heat probe to measure the flowing heat from the inside. inside the planet.
WATCH BELOW: NASA launches InSight in space
Meanwhile, a radio transmitter will return signals that follow the subtle rotation of Mars to reveal the size of the planet's nucleus and eventually determine if it remains melted.
NASA officials say it will take two to three months for the main instruments to be deployed and put into service.
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