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A NASA spacecraft designed to bury itself beneath the surface of Mars landed Monday on the Red Planet after a journey of 485 million kilometers (300 million miles) and a dangerous six-minute run down to
The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory flight controllers in Pasadena, California, jumped out of their seats and broke out in howls, applause and laughter at the announcement of the news.
"The touchdown has been confirmed! 19659002] The three-legged InSight spacecraft reached the surface after being slowed down by a parachute and braking engines, the space agency announced. The updates came via radio signals that took more than eight minutes to cross the approximately 160 million kilometers between Mars and Earth.
This was NASA's ninth attempt to land in Mars since the 1976 Viking probes. All but one of the previous hits in the United States have been successful.
The Curiosity robot landed for the last time in March 2012 on Mars.
The plan provided for the probe to increase from 12,300 mph (19,800 km / h) to zero in six flat minutes, piercing the Martian atmosphere and settling on the surface.
"Landing on Mars is one of the toughest jobs ever. that people have to do in global exploration, "said Bruce Banerdt, chief scientist of InSight. "It's so difficult, it's so dangerous that there's always a pretty good chance that something is wrong."
Mars has been the cemetery for many space missions. Until now, the success rate on the Red Planet has been only 40%, counting all attempts at overflight, orbital flight and landing done by the United States, Russia and other countries since 1960.
The United States, however, has recorded seven successful landings on Mars over the last four decades, not counting InSight, with only one ground hit.
InSight was shooting for Elysium Planitia, a plain located near the Martian equator and that the InSight team is hoping to be as flat as a Kansas car park, with little, rocks, if any.
This is not a rock picking 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. The self-hammering mole digs 5 meters (16 feet) to measure the internal heat of the planet, while the seismometer is listening for possible tremors.
No attempt of this kind has yet been attempted in our neighbor next door, nearly 100 million miles away. (160 million kilometers). No lander has dug more than several inches and no seismometer has ever worked on Mars.
In examining the interior of Mars, scientists hope to understand how the rock planets of our solar system were formed 4.5 billion years ago and why they turned out to be so different. – Mars cold and dry, Venus and Mercury burning, and a land conducive to life.
InSight, however, has no life detection capability. This will be left to future rovers. NASA's Mars 2020 mission, for example, will collect rocks that will eventually be brought back to Earth and badyzed for traces of ancient life.
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