NASA’s InSight spacecraft — the first geophysical observatory ever sent to Mars — touched down safely on the Martian surface on 26 November.
Cheers and applause erupted at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Monday as a waist-high unmanned lander, called InSight, touched down on Mars, capping a nearly seven-year journey from design to launch to landing.
The three-legged lander sent confirmation of its landing, on Elysium Planitia, just before 11:53 a.m. local time in mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Mission managers were still awaiting word of whether its solar panels deployed successfully, a necessary step for InSight to collect scientific data.
But each step of the landing sequence, which lasted just under seven minutes, unfolded as planned. The spacecraft deployed its parachute, jettisoned its heat shield and fired 12 engines to help to slow it down.
The first photo that InSight sent from the surface of Mars showed a flat, relatively rock-free landscape stretching to the horizon, with the foreground speckled with dust from the landing.
“Touchdown confirmed,” a mission control operator at NASA said, as pent-up anxiety and excitement surged through the room, and dozens of scientists leapt from their seats to embrace each other.
“It was intense and you could feel the emotion,” said NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, in an interview on NASA television afterward.
The vehicle appeared to be in good shape, according to the first communications received from the Martian surface.
InSight’s primary goal is to measure ‘marsquakes’ rippling through the planet, which should reveal how the planet is separated into a core, mantle and crust. Scientists can use that information to deduce how Mars and the Earth evolved differently over the past 4.5 billion years.
The US$994-million spacecraft carries 6 seismic sensors, built by an international team led by the French space agency CNES. Three of them are mounted on the lander’s deck and will monitor shaking in the coming days. These sensors can pick up vibrations such as those caused by Martian winds — a source of noise that confounded attempts to measure marsquakes with the 1976 Viking landers.
Three other, more sensitive sensors are nestled inside a round vacuum chamber. InSight will need to pick this chamber off its back and place it on the ground in order to measure marsquakes much more precisely. This step might not happen for a number of weeks.
The first photograph taken by the Mars InSight lander shows the rocky surface of Mars — and what appear to be specks of dirt on the camera’s protective cover.
InSight’s second major instrument is a heat-flow probe, built by the DLR German Aerospace Center in Cologne, to measure soil temperature down to 5 metres. Like the vacuum-packed seismometer, it too awaits deployment in the coming months.
“Both need still a last landing on Mars,” says Philippe Lognonné, a geophysicist at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics who heads the seismometer team. “This will be made by the robotic arm, from the deck of the lander toward the ground of Mars.”
InSight’s was the first Mars landing since the European Space Agency’s Schiaparelli lander crashed in October 2016.
