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Illustration of NASA InSight LG drilling the surface of Mars. (NASA via AP)
The endless expanse between the moment a spaceship hits the Martian atmosphere and its second surface on the rusty surface of the red planet is what scientists call "the seven minutes of terror."
It is as difficult as it may seem to land on Mars. More than half of missions fail to reach the surface safely. Since it takes more than seven minutes for light signals to travel 100 million kilometers on Earth, scientists have no control over the process. All they can do is program the spaceship with its best technology and wait.
Seven minutes of terror for InSight, NASA's latest NASA explorer, begins Monday, shortly before 3 pm Eastern Time. This is the first mission to study seismic waves on another planet. While exploring the interior of Mars, scientists seek to discover signs of tectonic activity and clues to the planet's past.
But they have to get there first.
[[[[Watch the live broadcast of the InSight landing by NASA]
Around 2:47 pm Monday, Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers will receive a signal that InSight has entered the Martian atmosphere. The spacecraft will collapse to the surface of the planet at a rate of 12,300 miles per hour; In less than two minutes, the heat shield will have reached 4,700 degrees Fahrenheit. In two minutes, a supersonic parachute will deploy to help the spacecraft slow down.
From there, the most critical descent checklist is quickly revealed: 15 seconds to separate the heat shield. Ten seconds to spread the legs. Activate the radar. Jettison the back shell. Fire the retrorockets. East for landing.
Assuming everything goes well, at 12:01 the scientists will hear a tiny beep – a signal that InSight is active and running on the red planet.
This photo taken by the Mars Odyssey Orbiter shows the landing site of NASA's InSight target in the Elysium Planitia region of Mars. (AFP PHOTO / NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU)
The goal is to determine the composition of Mars and its evolution since its formation, there are more than 4 billion years. The results could help solve the mystery of how the red planet has become the arid and desolate world we see today.
At the beginning of its history, Mars might have looked a lot like Earth. Magnetization in ancient rocks suggests a global magnetic field similar to that of the Earth, fed by a mantle and a metal core. The field would have protected the planet from radiation, allowing it to maintain a much thicker atmosphere than the one that currently exists. This probably allowed the liquid water to accumulate on the surface of Mars; Satellite images reveal the contours of lakes, deltas and canyons carved by rivers.
But the last three billion years have been a slow-motion disaster for the red planet. The dynamo is dead; the magnetic field has weakened; the water has evaporated; and more than half of the atmosphere has been removed by solar winds. The InSight mission was designed to find out why.
A mobile service tower is canceled to reveal the Atlas-V rocket with NASA's InSight spacecraft aboard Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in May. (Bill Ingalls / NASA via AP)
As InSight makes its precarious descent, NASA can get near real-time status information via the MarCo satellites, a tiny experimental spacecraft called CubeSats that accompanied it on its flight to Mars. Each has solar panels, a color camera and an antenna to relay communications from the Martian surface to Earth.
If the satellites succeed, they could be "a possible model for a new type of interplanetary communications relay," said systems engineer Anne Marinan in a statement. NASA press release.
Even without the MarCo spacecraft, NASA is expected to know if the LG's solar panels rolled out Monday night, thanks to records from the Mars reconnaissance orbiter. In a day, the agency will get its first images of the landing site of the spacecraft – a vast plain almost flat near the equator, known as Elysium Planitia. This is where science will begin.
Unlike Opportunity and Curiosity, the rovers that crisscross Mars in search of interesting rocks, InSight is designed to sit and listen. Using its dome-shaped seismic sensor, scientists hope to detect tiny tremors associated with meteorite impacts, dust storms and "marsquakes" generated by cooling the interior of the planet. As the seismic waves propagate, they will be deformed by changes in the materials encountered (perhaps molten rock plumes or liquid water tanks), revealing what lies beneath the surface of the earth. the planet.
InSight also has a drill capable of digging more than 4 meters deep – more than any Mars instrument. From there, the temperature of Mars can be determined by the temperature to be determined to release even more heat from the body of the planet. At the same time, two antennas will accurately track the landing gear position to determine how much Mars is moving around the sun.
The information from InSight will not add that what we know about Mars. They could provide clues as to what happened on Earth billions of years ago. Suzanne Smrekar, the deputy chief investigator of the mission, explained that the basics of the Earth's history had been lost.
"Mars gives us the opportunity to see the materials, the structure, the chemical reactions that are close to what we see inside the Earth, but it's preserved," he said. she said. "It gives us a chance to go back in time."
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