[ad_1]
TAMPA • A spacecraft costing nearly a billion dollars is about to make a dangerous landing on Mars today, though it manages to survive a high-speed approach and the heat overwhelming to enter the atmosphere of the red planet, a process nicknamed by NASA "six and a half minutes of terror".
"There is very little room for things to go wrong," said Rob Grover, head of the entry, descent and landing team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (National Administration). aeronautics and space) in Pasadena California.
If successful, the entry, descent and landing of Mars InSight – designed to be the first mission to listen to the inside of another planet and reveal the formation of rocky planets – will add another success to the record of NASA concerning the sending of spaceships to Mars.
Until now, the United States has been the only country to have achieved this, and only NASA's unmanned robotic robot, Curiosity, is still manufacturing tools on the surface. But if that fails, it will certainly not be the first.
Of 43 other international attempts to send orbiters, probes, landers, or rovers to Mars, 25 failed. Either they crashed into the surface, they missed their planned orbit or they disappeared after launch.
There will be no live video broadcast of Mars InSight's approach, and the signals will be broadcast back to Earth with a delay of eight minutes. Mission managers can not intervene if something is wrong. The entire landing sequence is preprogrammed in the on – board computer.
This explains why the descent will be a moment of terror for NASA, as mission officials will have no idea how the spacecraft will behave in real time, given the delay in receiving signals.
At 19:40 GMT, the spacecraft is expected to separate from the cruise stage that took it to Mars. A minute later, the spacecraft will turn around to steer in to enter the atmosphere. A touchdown is scheduled for 19:54 GMT (3:54 tomorrow, Singapore time).
The first "beep" emitted by the X-band radio of the spacecraft – indicating if InSight has survived the landing – is scheduled for 2001, GMT time.
The first image of the surface of Mars is expected at 2004 GMT. However, it is possible that this image only happens much later.
FRANCE MEDIA AGENCY
[ad_2]
Source link
