From the Liveblog of
Monday, November 26, 2018
Anxiety abounds at NASA as Mars landing day arrives
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A NASA spacecraft’s six-month journey to Mars nears its dramatic grand finale Monday, in what scientists and engineers hope will be a soft precision landing on flat red plains.
The InSight lander aimed for an afternoon touchdown, as anxiety built among those involved in the $1 billion international effort.
InSight’s perilous descent through the Martian atmosphere, after a trip of 300 million miles (482 million kilometers), has stomachs churning and nerves stretched to the max. Although an old pro at this, NASA last attempted a landing on Mars six years ago.
The robotic geologist — designed to explore Mars’s mysterious insides — must go from 12,300 mph (19,800 kph) to zero in six minutes flat as it pierces the Martian atmosphere, pops out a parachute, fires its descent engines and, hopefully, lands on three legs.
“Landing on Mars is one of the hardest single jobs that people have to do in planetary exploration,” notes InSight’s lead scientist, Bruce Banerdt. “It’s such a difficult thing, it’s such a dangerous thing that there’s always a fairly uncomfortably large chance that something could go wrong.”
The US has pulled off seven successful Mars landings in the past four decades, as well as one failed touchdown. No other country has managed to set and operate a spacecraft on the dusty red surface. InSight could hand NASA its eighth win.
It is shooting for Elysium Planitia, a plain near the Martian equator that the InSight team hopes is as flat as a parking lot in Kansas with few, if any, rocks. This is no rock-collecting expedition. Instead, the stationary 800-pound (360-kilogram) lander will use its 6-foot (1.8-meter) robotic arm to place a mechanical mole and seismometer on the ground.
The self-hammering mole will burrow 16 feet (5 meters) down to measure the planet’s internal heat, while the ultra-high-tech seismometer listens for possible marsquakes. Nothing like this has been attempted before at our smaller next-door neighbor, nearly 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) away.
— AP
