On Monday, NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Lab will be on pins and needles, waiting to see if the InSight spacecraft touches down safely on Mars.
InSight was launched seven months ago, traveling 301,223,981 miles and reaching a top speed of 6,200 mph. This is NASA's first mission to study the deep interior of Mars, and the craft's landing will be tricky. InSight will enter the planet's atmosphere at hypersonic speed, and must slow down quickly in order to make a gentle landing. If all goes according to plan, InSight will touch down at noon PST, with signals reaching engineers back on Earth eight minutes later.
"We've studied Mars from orbit and from the surface since 1965, learning about its weather, atmosphere, geology, and surface chemistry," said Lori Glaze, acting director of the Planetary Science Division in NASA's Science Mission Directorate. "Now we finally will explore inside Mars and deepen our understanding of our terrestrial neighbor as NASA prepares to send human explorers deeper in to the solar system."
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The Jet Propulsion Lab's entry, descent, and landing team pre-programmed all stages of InSight's landing, taking into consideration weather reports sent from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and they might have to slightly tweak the algorithm right before InSight starts its descent. NASA says it took more than a decade to build InSight, and should it land successfully on Mars, it will take two to three months for InSight's robotic arm to set up and calibrate all of the mission's instruments.
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