NASA's InSight Mars Lander hits a week from today!

The first landing of Mars for more than six years will take place in a week.

NASA's $ 850 million InSight lander will arrive on the red planet in the afternoon of November 26, hoping to end up facing a rush of celebrations resembling those sparked off by the successful touch of the March Curiosity rover on August 5, 2012.

But success is far from guaranteed. [NASA’s InSight Mars Lander: 10 Surprising Facts]

"Even though we have already done so, landing on Mars is difficult and this mission is no different," said Rob Manning, chief engineer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Pasadena, California, in a recent video on the upcoming landing of InSight. .

"It takes thousands of steps to go from the top of the atmosphere to the surface, and each of them must work perfectly to be a successful mission," added Manning.

The most crucial steps for InSight are: to line up to hit the Martian atmosphere at a precise 12 degree angle (shallow, it will bounce, all steeper, and it will burn); deploy his supersonic parachute then his landing legs; and turn on his downhill engines for the final touchdown.

All this happens in just 6 minutes – the time of InSight journey in the air of the red planet. (Curiosity's "7 minutes of terror" entry, descent and landing sequence lasted a little longer as the large heavy vehicle had adopted a different force-touching strategy: it was lowered to the Martian surface by a celestial crane propelled by a rocket.)

InSight will land near Curiosity, in a flat and boring plain called Elysium Planitia.

"If Elysium Planitia was a salad, it would consist of romaine lettuce and kale – no salad dressing," said InSight principal investigator, Bruce Banerdt, of the JPL, in a statement. "If it was an ice cream, it would be vanilla."

But the blandness of Elysium Planitia is a feature, not a bug. InSight will study inside Mars, so that mission team members do not pay attention to interesting surface features. Indeed, mountains, canyons and rocks are not welcome because they would only make a landing more difficult.

InSight will carry out its scientific work with two main instruments: a thermal probe and a series of hypersensitive seismometers. The data collected by this craft will reveal a lot about the internal structure and composition of Mars, mission team members said.

In addition, mission scientists will use InSight communication equipment to track the slight jitter of Mars' axis of rotation. This information should provide key information about the core of the planet.

Together, InSight's observations should help scientists better understand how rocky planets are formed and evolve, NASA officials said.

InSight – whose name is the abbreviation for Inner Intelligence using seismic surveys, geodesy and heat transport – was launched at the top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on May 5th. Two tiny vehicles, Mars Cube One, known as MarCO-A and MarCO, shared this experience. -B.

The MarCO schoolbag duo is engaged in a demonstration mission to show that cubesats can explore interplanetary space. MarCO-A and MarCO-B will also attempt to transmit InSight data to the home during the landing attempt of the LG next week, although this is not a critical task. other spacecraft, such as NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, will also do so.

MarCO-A and MarCO-B will not attempt to land in their turn. They will move near Mars next Monday and their operational life will end soon after.

Mike Wall's book on extraterrestrial life research, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018, illustrated by Karl Tate) has just been published. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally posted on Space.com.