InSight Diary: Beat the odds and land on Mars

Professor Tom Pike of Imperial College London is part of the scientific team of the InSight mission to Mars led by the United States. His group has provided tiny seismometers that will allow the NASA lander to detect "earthquakes", which should show us the internal structure of the red planet. Here, just hours before InSight is trying to reach the surface of Mars, Professor Pike reveals his feelings.

As a scientist, it's hard to think that chance can play a role in achieving a breakthrough.

Napoleon would have asked, "I know he's a good general, but is he lucky?"

No matter which scientist would back down if he thought that he would be questioned the same way.

For engineers, it would be considered an insult if their bridges or tunnels were to rely on luck for not collapsing or collapsing.

However, while we are now waiting for the InSight lander to reach the top of the Mars atmosphere, I hope to have some luck.

This is certainly not meant to be an insult! Some of the best engineers in the world, from NASA's reaction propulsion laboratory, put our instruments on Mars.

Given that about 60% of missions launched on Mars do not succeed, their track record is incredible.

The last seven missions that JPL sent to Red Planet, Odyssey Orbiter, Spirit and Opportunity Rovers, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Phoenix and Curiosity Rover – all these missions were successful.

Six years ago, Curiosity was lowered on the Martian surface by the unlikely "Skycrane", an astonishing piece of engineering. We do not want JPL to break this series of wins now!

But even the best engineers in the world do not master all the risks that InSight faces in a few hours as it descends to the surface of the planet. There is a series of spacecraft operations that must first be executed flawlessly, but even after that, we could land in the wrong place.

A rocky landing?

Mars is a rocky planet. Without any rain, only the wind slowly breaks down the rocks that litter the surface. And the rocks are continually spilled on the surface as the meteorites penetrate the weak atmosphere of Mars for billions of years and rediscover the surface.

If we go down on a big rock, we risk losing a leg or piercing the deck of our lander.

It's a game of chance – how much luck do we need? Constantinos Charalambous, a member of our UK team, worked with Matt Golombek and JPL scientists to calculate these probabilities.

This is not simple. The best images of our landing area allow to see rocks of one meter in diameter. But rocks less than half that size could kill our mission.

We had to choose a landing site based on peering below our resolution, using the best statistics of the problem. Constantinos wrote his doctoral thesis on this problem, based on the data we obtained from the Phoenix 2007/8 mission on Mars.

The Phoenix microscope station gave us the most accurate look we've ever had from the ground on Mars. Constantinos worked back from these images to explain how the rocks on Mars fractured huge rocks several meters in diameter, to the finest invisible dust for the first human to land on the planet. .

Based on these calculations for the area we chose to land on InSight, we estimate that the chances of falling on a rock that is too big are perhaps 3%. This is certainly not impossible, and JPL has beaten the worst odds of the past.

But it is also fair to say that they have tried their luck and that not all missions have had the same luck.

For example, it seems that Beagle II, the first and only attempt of the United Kingdom to land on Mars, had the misfortune to fall right next to a rock preventing it from deploying its petals to recharge. and send a signal to the Earth.

Crossed fingers

It's not just rocks. The atmosphere of Mars varies enormously, and we rely on it to slow us down. The Schiaparelli mission of the European Space Agency, the latest attempt at landing on Mars, failed when she began turning too fast under her parachute while descending.

Although I am reluctant to admit it, we need a little luck on Monday. As Napoleon also said: "The greatest events are only one thread."

I hope this wire is strong enough to bring us to the surface of March from one piece.