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NASA's first spaceship built to explore the inside of another world in the direction of a planned landing on a vast arid plain on Mars on Monday, carrying detection instruments from the planetary heat and seismic rumblings never measured elsewhere than on Earth.
Navigating 301 million miles (548 million km) during a six-month journey into the deep space, the InSight landing robot was to land toward the dusty, rocky surface of the red planet around 20 hours GMT.
If all goes as planned, InSight will cross the top of the thin Martian atmosphere at 19,310 kilometers at the hour. Slow motion by the friction, the deployment of a giant parachute and retro rockets, InSight will descend in the space of 6 km and a half in a pink Martian sky in 6 minutes and a half, moving only 5 km / h at the landing.
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The fixed probe, launched in May from California, will then pause for 16 minutes to allow dust to settle, literally, around its landing site, before disc-shaped solar panels unfold like wings to power the spacecraft.
The NASA (JPL) propulsion laboratory mission control team near Los Angeles hopes to receive a real-time confirmation of the arrival of the gear from data relayed by A pair of miniature satellites launched with InSight and flying over Mars.
JPL controllers are also waiting to receive a photo of the new probe environment in the smooth, Martian plain near the equator, called Elysium. Planitia. (Photo: REUTERS / Gene Blevnis)
The JPL controllers are also waiting to receive a photo of the new probe environment in the plain plain and plain Martian near the equator, called Elysium Planitia.
The site is about 373 Curiosity, the last spacecraft sent to the red planet by NASA, is 600 km from the landing site of the car in 2012.
InSight, the smallest model of 360 kg (880 pounds) Indoor Exploration Using Seismic Surveys, Geodesy and Heat Transportation – is the 21st US Mars-based mission, which dates back to Mariner's overflights in the 1960s. dozens of other missions on Mars have been sent by other countries.
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InSight will spend 24 months – about a Martian year – with the help of seismic monitoring and underground temperature readings for break through the mysteries of the formation of Mars and, by extension, the origins of the Earth. and other rocky planets of the inner solar system.
As tectonics and other Earth forces wiped out most of the evidence from its beginnings, much of Mars – about a third of its size – would have remained largely static, creating a winding machine geological time for scientists.
The main instrument of InSight is a French-made seismometer, designed to record the smallest vibrations caused by the "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 is expected to provide the first significant data on planetary seismic shocks beyond the Earth.
InSight is also equipped with a German-made drill for digging up to 5 meters underground, pulling behind it a thermal probe rope to measure heat flowing to the inside of the planet .
Meanwhile, a radio transmitter will send signals indicating the slight rotational movement of Mars to reveal the size of the planet's nucleus and possibly determine if it remains melted.
It will take two to three months for the main instruments to be deployed and put into service.
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