NASA is counting down to a nail-biting touchdown on Monday of the US$993 million Mars InSight, the first spacecraft to listen for quakes and study the inner workings of another rocky planet.
No one is on board the spacecraft, which launched nearly seven months ago and has traveled about 482 million kilometers, but part of its mission is to inform efforts to one day send human explorers to the Red Planet, which NASA hopes to do by the 2030s.
The lander is the first to reach Mars since 2012, when NASA’s Curiosity rover touched down to scour the surface and analyze rocks for signs that life forms could once have inhabited Earth’s neighbor, now a frigid and dry planet.
Photo: AFP / NASA / JPL-Caltech
InSight must survive tense entry into Mars’ atmosphere, traveling at 19,800kph and swiftly slowing to just 8kph.
This entry, descent and landing phase begins at 11:47 am in California, and is only half-jokingly referred to at NASA as the “six-and-a-half minutes of terror.”
Of 43 missions launched toward Mars, only 18 have made it intact — a success rate of about 40 percent. All those that made it came from the US.
“Going to Mars is really, really hard,” NASA Science Mission Directorate associate administrator Thomas Zurbuchen said. “The exciting part is we are building on the success of the best team that has ever landed on this planet, which is the NASA team with its contractors and its collaborators.”
The name InSight is derived from “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.”
The spacecraft itself stands about waist high, at 1m, and if its solar arrays are deployed they will span 6m.
Fully fueled, InSight weighs more than 360kg, about the same as a Harley Davidson motorcycle.
Its central instrument is a quake-sensing seismometer that was made by French space agency CNES.
“This is the only NASA mission until now which is conceived around a foreign-made instrument,” CNES president Jean-Yves le Gall said. “So it’s a mission that is fundamentally for the United States, for France and for improving our understanding of Mars.”
The six quake sensors on board are so sensitive that they should reveal the smallest tremors on Mars, such as the faint pull of its moon Phobos, impacts from meteors and possibly evidence of volcanic activity.
Seismology has taught humanity much about the formation of Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, but much of the Earth-based evidence has been lost to the recycling of the crust, driven by plate tectonics. This process does not exist on Mars.
The spacecraft also has a self-hammering probe that can burrow as deep as 3m to 5m, offering the first precise measurement of below-ground temperatures on Mars and how much heat escapes from its interior.
InSight was built by Lockheed Martin, and is modeled after the Phoenix spacecraft that landed near the Martian north pole in 2008. Like Phoenix, InSight’s arrival is to be aided by a parachute. It has a heat shield to help slow down the spacecraft and protect against the hot friction of entering Mars’ atmosphere.
The lander must set itself down upright. Then, another critical step is for the solar arrays to deploy, as the lander is to rely entirely on solar power for its one-year mission.
NASA should know within minutes if the landing went well or not, but will have to wait more than five hours for confirmation of the solar array deployment, due to the orbit pattern of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey, which can communicate InSight’s status back to Earth.
That first confirming ping should be at 8:04pm GMT.
“I do have a lot of blood sweat and tears invested in this, and I am looking forward to a nice, safe touchdown on Monday,” said Stu Spath, InSight program manager at Lockheed Martin.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of
RSS