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The US Space Agency has released a video describing the perilous journey that its InSight probe will perform until the surface of Mars later this month.
Led by Rob Manning, the chief engineer of NASA 's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the film describes the various stages of what is called "entry, descent and flight". ;landing".
This is a sequence of great peril.
The agency produced a similar video for its 2012 Curiosity Mars lander called The 7 Minutes of Terror.
This became a viral success. This one is not as spectacular but it nevertheless has a lot of success in communicating the drama of a landing on Mars.
Launched from Earth in May, Insight is still (Friday) a few million miles from the red planet.
The time of arrival is set, says Tom Hoffman, InSight Project Manager at JPL.
"We're going to land on November 26 at about 11:47 Pacific Time (19:47 GMT), whatever it may be – in other words, we're on ballistic entry, we can not change it, we can not go back" he told reporters this week.
InSight is a static probe. In other words, he will remain motionless in the same place; it will not circle the world like Curiosity and NASA's other wheeled robots.
This will be the first mission to focus primarily on the interior of Mars.
He will put seismometers on the surface to detect "earthquakes".
These tremors should reveal the stratification of the underground rock – data comparable to those of the Earth to further illuminate the formation of planets 4.6 billion years ago.
The seismometer experiment is conducted by French. The European nation has provided broadband sensors that will detect low-frequency ground vibrations, while the United Kingdom has provided a trio of microsimeter meters, the size of a pound sterling coin, intended for higher frequencies. high.
The British instrument was developed at Imperial College London and at the University of Oxford. His chief investigator is Professor Tom Pike.
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