Mars landing plan details of NASA's InSight spacecraft

Named NASA the largest parking lot of Mars . Scientists call it Elysium Planitia. Once there, the machine will begin to probe the Martian soil to learn more about the interior of the planet.

But before you get there, you have to go back to the surface first. The atmosphere of Mars represents only 1% of its thickness on Earth, which means that nothing prevents an object from crashing almost at full speed.

To solve this problem, once the pier is separated from the cruise phase, it will be dropped. in the atmosphere in an aeroshell. A parachute and retrorockets are used to slow down the ship. Once close to the ground, the landing legs exit the craft to absorb more impact.

Given the recent global dust storm that paralyzed Opportunity rover, NASA will be on the lookout for bad weather. Using the Mars reconnaissance orbiter already above the red planet, daily weather updates will be received and badyzed.

But the space agency says that even if the weather goes bad, inSight should not be affected because it was designed to survive. even sandstorms.

The landing of the Space Shuttle will be documented by a pair of CubeSats satellites that accompany the mission.
Once this difficult stage of landing is over, InSight will attempt to better understand where humanity could sometimes call its second home.

Different instruments will be used to search for earthquakes, disturbances of the axis of rotation of Mars, information on the planet's nucleus or the amount of heat escaping from underneath.

InSight was built in 2010 and was originally scheduled to visit Mars in 2016. Due to the failure of one of the instruments, the launch was canceled and postponed to that date.