Anxiety reigns at NASA as approaching the landing on Mars

NASA's six-month-long spacecraft on Mars approached its grand finale on Monday in what scientists and engineers hoped would be a soft landing on a plain red.

The InSight LG aimed at a touchdown of the afternoon, as anxiety grew among those involved in the international effort of a billion dollars.

The perilous descent of InSight through the Martian atmosphere, after a journey of 482 million kilometers (300 million miles), had full belly and tense nerves. Although he was an old pro, NASA tried to land on Mars six years ago.

The robotic geologist – designed to explore the mysterious interiors of Mars – must go from zero to three hundred and fifty kilometers (19,000 km / h) in just six minutes, as it pierces the Martian atmosphere, pulls out a parachute, triggers its descent engines and land, hopefully, to three. legs.

"Landing on Mars is one of the hardest jobs that people have to do in planetary exploration," said InSight senior scientist Bruce Banerdt. "It's so difficult, it's so dangerous that there's always a pretty uncomfortable chance that something is not right."

The success rate of the Earth on Mars is 40%, considering each attempt at overflight, orbital flight and landing carried out by the United States, Russia and other countries since 1960.

But the United States has managed seven landings on Mars over the last four decades. With only one hit missed, it's an enviable record. No other country has managed to install and operate a spacecraft on a dusty red surface.

InSight could give NASA its eighth win.

The InSight team hopes it is as flat as a car park in Kansas, with little or no rocks, and targets Elysium Planitia, a plain near the Martian equator. This is not a rock collecting 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 ultramodern seismometer listens to possible marsquakes. Nothing like it was tried before at our smaller neighbor, located at nearly 160 million kilometers.

No experiments have ever been robotically moved from the probe to the actual Martian surface. No lander has dug more than several inches and no seismometer has ever worked on Mars.

By examining the deepest and darkest interior of Mars – still preserved from its earliest days – scientists hope to create 3D images that could reveal how the rock planets of our solar system were formed there are 4.5 billion years ago and why they turned out so different. One of the big questions is what made the Earth so welcoming to life.

Mars had formerly rivers and lakes; deltas and lake bottoms are now dry and the planet is cold. Venus is an oven because of its thick and jarring atmosphere. Mercury, the closest to the sun, has a positively cooked surface.

The global know-how gained through the two years of InSight's operation could even extend to rocky worlds beyond our solar system, according to Banerdt. The discoveries on Mars could help explain the kind of conditions present in these so-called "exoplanets" and their integration into history as we try to understand how planets are formed, "he said.

Focusing on planetary building blocks, InSight has no life detection capability. This will be left for future rovers. NASA's March 2020 mission, for example, will collect rocks that may contain traces of ancient life.

Because it's been so long since NASA's last Martian landing – the Curiosity rover in 2012 – Mars mania is affecting not only the space and science communities, but ordinary people as well.

Viewing nights are planned from coast to coast to coast in museums, planetariums and libraries, as well as in France, where the InSight seismometer was designed and built. The NASDAQ giant screen at Times Square in New York will begin broadcasting NASA TV one hour before the scheduled time for InSight at 3 pm. Touchdown EST; The same is true of the Udvar-Hazy Center at the National Air and Space Museum in Chantilly, Virginia, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The InSight spacecraft was built near Denver by Lockheed Martin.

But the real action, at least on Earth, will take place at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, home to the InSight flight control team. NASA offers a special 360-degree online broadcast from the control center.

Confirmation of landing may take a few minutes or hours. At a minimum, there is an eight-minute communication delay between Mars and the Earth.

Two suitcase-sized satellites followed by InSight since take-off in May will attempt to relay its radio signals to Earth, with a potential latency of less than nine minutes. These experimental CubeSats will fly over the red planet without stopping. Signals can also go directly from InSight to radio telescopes in West Virginia and Germany. It will take longer to hear NASA's orbiters on Mars.

Project leader, Tom Hoffman, said Sunday that he was doing his best to stay outwardly calm while the hours were running out. Once InSight telephoned home from the Martian surface, however, he expects to behave like his three grandchildren at Thanksgiving dinner, running like crazy and screaming.

"Just to warn anyone who's sitting near me … I'm going to leave my little four-year-old inside of you, so be careful," he says.

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