The six-and-a-half minutes that make up the final phase of the landing are reminiscent of NASA’s Curiosity Rover’s landing on Mars in 2012. NASA called that landing “seven minutes of terror.”
The “slightly shorter touchdown” on the Red Planet has still ramped up the anxiety for members of the InSight team here on earth. “It’s a little less terror,” jokes Rob Grover, who leads the team in charge of InSight’s landing at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Yet it is easy to see why the landing of the one-meter (3.3 feet) tall, 358-kilogram (789 pounds) spacecraft is going to be a nail-biting experience for the hundreds of people who have worked on the mission – of all the missions to the Red Planet, only 40 percent have been successful, reports CBC Canada.
“We all get butterflies when we think about the spacecraft actually landing,” said Catherine Johnson, a professor at the University of British Columbia, who is a co-investigator of the international team that will measure seismic activity on Mars using InSight.
InSight will have a harrowing landing
Any landing sequence is an harrowing event, and InSight’s won’t be any different. The solar-powered spacecraft will be barreling into the Martian atmosphere at 14,100 mph (22,700 kph), then deploy a large parachute to slow its descent. Then, as the spacecraft nears the surface of Mars, it will pop free of its back shell and lose its parachute.
InSight will go in for a gentle touchdown with the aid of 12 descent engines about 6 minutes after getting its first taste of Mars’ air. “The landing will kick off a two-year mission in which InSight will become the first spacecraft to study Mars’ deep interior,” explained NASA on its website. “Its data also will help scientists understand the formation of all rocky worlds, including our own.”
InSight is being followed to Mars by two mini-spacecraft comprising NASA’s Mars Cube One (MarCO), the first deep-space mission for CubeSats. If MarCO makes its planned Mars flyby, it will attempt to relay data from InSight as it enters the planet’s atmosphere and lands.
About 80 live viewing events for the public to watch the InSight landing will take place around the world. For a complete list of landing event watch parties, visit: https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/timeline/landing/watch-in-person/
