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With only one day left, NASA's InSight probe aims for a bull strike on Mars, zooming in as an arrow with no return possible. The InSight trip, which lasted six months and 300 million miles (482 million kilometers), marks a precarious orange spot Monday afternoon.
The robotic geologist – designed to explore the interior of Mars, from the surface to the nucleus – must go from 12,300 mph (19,800 km / h) to zero in six minutes flat at the time of piercing the # Martian atmosphere, to release a parachute, to trigger its descent engines and, hopefully, to land on three legs.
This is the first time NASA has been trying to land on Mars for six years, and everyone involved is naturally worried. Thomas Zurbuchen, senior scientist at NASA, said Sunday that his stomach was already turning around. The most difficult thing is to do nothing, he says, except hope and pray that everything goes well for InSight.
"Landing on Mars is one of the most difficult jobs that can be done in global exploration," he said. The principal scientist of InSight, Bruce Banerdt. "It's so difficult, it's so dangerous that there's always a pretty big chance that something is not right."
The success rate of the Earth on Mars is 40%, considering all attempts at overflight, orbital flight and landing. the United States, Russia and other countries dating back to 1960. But the United States has managed seven landings on Mars over the past four decades. With one touchdown, it's an enviable record. No other country has managed to install and operate a spacecraft on a dusty red surface. InSight could give its eighth victory to NASA.
This is shooting at Elysium Planitia, a plain near the Martian equator that the InSight team hopes to be as flat as a parking lot in Kansas with little or no rocks. This is not a rock collecting expedition. Instead, the 360-pound (360-kilogram) static undercarriage will use its 6-foot robotic arm to place a mechanical mole and seismometer on the ground.
5 meters) to measure the internal heat of the planet, while the ultra-sophisticated seismometer listens to possible marsquakes. Nothing like it was tried before at our smaller neighbor, located at nearly 160 million kilometers. 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 since its inception, scientists hope to create 3D images that could reveal the rocky planets of the system formed 4 , 5 billion years old 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 planetary know-how acquired with the $ 1 billion InSight, a two-year operation, could even spill over rocky worlds beyond our solar system, according to Banerdt. The discoveries on Mars could help explain the kind of conditions prevailing over these so-called "exoplanets" and their connection to the story we are trying to understand about planet formation, he said.
Focusing on planetary building blocks, InSight has no life detection capability. This will be left for future rovers. NASA's March 2020 mission, for example, will collect rocks that may contain traces of an ancient life. Because it's been such a long time since NASA's last Martian landing – the Curiosity rover in 2012 – Mars Mania is stirring not only in space, but also in scientific communities, but also in everyday life.
as well as in France, where the InSight seismometer was designed and built. The NASDAQ giant screen at Times Square in New York will start broadcasting NASA one hour before the scheduled time for InSight at 3pm. Touchdown EST; The same is true of the Udvar-Hazy Center at the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Lockheed Martin built the InSight probe near Denver
But the real action, at least on Earth, will take place at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which houses the flight control team. 'InSight. NASA offers a special 360-degree online broadcast from the control center. Confirming the landing can take minutes or hours. At a minimum, there is an eight-minute communication delay between Mars and the Earth.
Two suitcase-sized satellites followed by InSight since May takeoff will attempt to relay its radio signals to Earth, with a potential delay time of less than nine. minutes. These experimental CubeSats will fly over the red planet without stopping. Signals can also go directly from InSight to radio telescopes in West Virginia and Germany. It will take longer to hear NASA's orbiters on Mars.
The project director, Tom Hoffman, said he was doing his best to remain calm, apparently, as the hours went by. Once InSight telephoned home from the Martian surface, however, he expects to behave like his three grandchildren at Thanksgiving dinner, running like crazy and screaming. "Just to warn anyone who's sitting next to me … I'll leave my little four-year-old inside, so be careful," he said.
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