Nasa’s only spaceship meant to investigate the deepest innards of yet another globe sped towards that touchdown on a huge, desolate plain on Mars slated for Monday, bearing sensors to measure planet warmth and tectonic rumors ever observed anywhere else other than Earth.
The autonomous rover Insight is set to land on the sandy, stone surface of Mars at around 8 p.m. GMT after a six-month journey across outer space that took it 301 million miles (548 million kilometers).
If everything goes as planned, Insight would scream into the tiny Martian atmosphere at 12,000 mph (19,310 kilometers per hour). Insight would fall 77 miles under pinkish Martian sky to the ground in 6 1/2 minutes, traveling at only five mph (8 kph) by both the moment it falls, delayed by resistance, the release of a huge parachute, and retro thrusters.
The motionless mission, which was shot from California in May, also will take a 16-minute break to allow the dust to settle on its landing point while disc-shaped solar cells are deployed like flaps that can provide electricity to the spaceship.
ELYSIUM PLANITIA
The control tower crew at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles is hoping to get true verification of something like the vessel’s landing via data provided by a couple of tiny satellites launched alongside InSight and whizzing overhead Mars.
The Elysium Planitia, a flat, clean Martian plain near the entire planet equator, is expected to provide JPL commanders with an image of the satellite’s unfamiliar setting.
The location is around 373 miles (600 kilometers) from where the car-sized Mars rover Discovery, Nasa’s final mission launched to the Red Planet, landed in 2012.
The shorter Insight project, which weighs 880 pounds (360 kilograms) and is named for Inner Investigation Utilizing Seismic Investigations, Geodesy, and Heat Transport, is the 21st US-launched Mars mission, going back to 1960s Mariner fly-bys. Other countries have already sent nearly a dozen additional Mars missions.
DURATION
InSight would spend 24 months (about one Martian year) utilizing seismic monitoring and subterranean temperature records to solve questions on how Mars evolved, and therefore by implication, the genesis of Earth as well as other planetary systems throughout the inner solar system.
Although geology, as well as other processes, have obliterated many traces of Earth’s early past, much of Mars – which is approximately one-third the size of Earth – is thought to have stayed fairly static, providing scientists with a geologic time capsule.
The main instrument aboard InSight is a seismometer created in France to monitor even the tiniest tremors caused by “marsquakes” and meteor collisions from around the world. The gadget, which will be put here on the ground either by the lander’s robotic manipulator, is just so precise that this can detect seismic waves with a range half that of a hydrogen atom.
Mostly during the expedition, researchers hope to encounter a dozen to 100 marsquakes, which will provide data that will aid them in determining the depth, volume, and structure of the planet’s core, the solid mantle that surrounds it, and the planet’s outer part, the crust.
