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Engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), near Los Angeles, burst out with applause and applause when they receive signals confirming the arrival of InSight on Martian soil – a vast barren plain near the equator of the planet – shortly before 3 pm (EST). )
A few minutes later, the JPL controllers received a fuzzy "selfie" photo of the new probe environment on the red planet, showing the edge of a leg of the lander at the edge of a rock .
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NASA's live TV coverage monitoring evenings took place in museums, libraries and other public places around the world, including Times Square, where a small crowd of 40 or 50 braved a driving rain to attend the show on a giant television screen attached to a wall of Nasdaq building.
The InSight descent and landing, which consists of approximately 1,000 individual steps to be accurately executed to succeed, has completed a six-month journey at 301 million miles (548 million km) from the Earth.
The spacecraft was launched from California in May. on his mission of nearly $ 1 billion. He will spend the next 24 months – about a Martian year – gathering a wealth of data to solve mysteries about the formation of Mars and, by extension, about the origins of the Earth and other rocky planets of the internal solar system. .
"The reason we dig in Mars is to better understand not only Mars, but the Earth itself," said Bruce Banerdt of JPL, principal investigator of InSight.
One of the central questions is why Mars, a relatively hot and humid planet, has evolved so different from the Earth into a mostly arid, desolate and cold world, devoid of life.
It is thought that the answers have a connection with the unexplained absence, since the ancient past of Mars, of a magnetic field or tectonic activity, said the chief scientist of the NASA, James Green.
While terrestrial tectonics and other forces erased most of the early evidence, much of Mars, about one-third the size of the Earth, remained largely static, creating a geological environment. Time Machine
InSight and the upcoming March Rover Mission, scheduled for 2020, are both seen as precursors to the eventual human exploration of Mars, a goal that NASA's director , Jim Bridenstine, said Monday, could be reached as early as the mid-2030s.
DAREDEVIL LANDING
InSight is the eighth spacecraft to have landed successfully on Mars, all operated by NASA.
This three-bladed lander penetrated the thin Martian atmosphere at 12:35 pm (19,795 km) an hour and 77 miles at the surface in seven minutes, slowed down by atmospheric friction, a giant parachute, and retro rockets.
The endless expanse between the moment a spaceship hits the Martian atmosphere and the second time that it hit the rusty surface of the red planet was what scientists called "the seven minutes of terror" ".
The fixed probe has been programmed to pause for 16 minutes so that the dust settles, literally. As a rule of thumb, around its landing site, two disk – shaped solar panels had to be deployed as wings to power the spacecraft.
But scientists did not expect to check the solar panels for at least several hours. 19659004] InSight – its name is the abbreviation for Inner Exploration Intelligence using seismic surveys, geodesy and heat transport – marks the 21st Mars mission launched by the United States, which dates back to Mariner's overflights in the 1960s. 19659004] Nearly two dozen other missions on Mars were sent from other countries.
The new home of InSight in the middle of Elysium Planitia, vast relatively smooth stretch close to the planet's equator, lies about 600 km from the Curiosity, the last spacecraft sent to the red planet by NASA.
PEERING BENEATH SURFACE
The main instrument of InSight is a seismometer built in France, designed to record the lighter of the two the vibrations of "marsquakes" and meteor impacts around the planet. The device, which must be placed on the surface by the robotic arm of the LG, is so sensitive that it can measure a seismic wave barely half the radius of an atomic dome. # 39; hydrogen.
Scientists expect to see a dozen to 100 marsquakes during the mission. produce data to help them deduce the depth, density and composition of the planet's core, from the surrounding rocky mantle to the outermost layer, the crust.
The NASA Viking probes of the mid-1970s were also equipped with seismometers. but they were bolted to the top of the landers, 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.
A second instrument, provided by the German Space Agency, consists of a drill to be buried up to 5 meters underground, pulling behind it. a rope-shaped heat probe to measure the heat circulating inside the planet.
Meanwhile, a radio transmitter will return signals that will follow the subtle ripple of Mars's rotation to reveal the size of the planet's nucleus and eventually determine whether it remains molten. [19659004] NASA officials say it will take two to three months for the main instruments to be deployed and put into service.
The landing data and the initial photo were relayed to Earth by two suitcase-sized satellites launched with InSight. flying over Mars when he reached his destination.
The twinning "Cubesats" for the flight to Mars was the first space-based use of a miniature satellite technology that space engineers consider an inexpensive and promising alternative to larger and more complex vehicles.
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