NASA's InSight lander touches down safely on Mars
After a seven-month journey, the robotic lander survived the 'seven minutes of terror' to begin a mission studying the deep interior of the red planet.
NASA's InSight spacecraft landed safely on Mars on Monday, surviving a fiery, high-speed descent through the planet's thin atmosphere to begin a mission unlike any before it: listening to the deep interior of another world.
Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California erupted in cheers as a signal confirmed the touchdown on Elysium Planitia, a flat, unremarkable plain chosen precisely because it offered a safe, boring place to set down. The final descent — the so-called "seven minutes of terror" during which the craft slowed from around 19,800 kilometres per hour to a gentle stop entirely on its own — had to be flawless, because there was no way to intervene from Earth.
Unlike the rovers that had roamed the Martian surface before it, InSight was built to stay put. Its instruments included an ultra-sensitive seismometer to detect "marsquakes" and a heat probe designed to burrow several metres underground, together giving scientists their first detailed look at the planet's crust, mantle and core.
The goal was not just to understand Mars, but to understand how rocky planets, including Earth, form and evolve. By measuring how seismic waves travel through the Martian interior, researchers hoped to reconstruct its hidden structure.
Minutes after landing, InSight sent back its first grainy image of the surface, dust still settling on the lens. For a mission years in the making, it was a modest picture that marked the start of an ambitious attempt to take the pulse of another planet.