Today the Mars InSight lander arrives on the Red Planet!
Mars Ho! Starting at 3:00 pm this afternoon, Nov. 26, 2018, the Mars InSight lander will begin its descent to land on the surface of Mars. Since May 5, this $850 million spacecraft has traveled more than 300 million miles to our neighboring planet.
This landing will be no easy task. Statistically, less than half of all Mars missions have been successful in their travels to the planet. When it comes to landing on Mars, it is a very different process than landing on Earth. Mars has a thin atmosphere (1 percent as thick!) that can prevent InSight from landing successfully. To pass through the thin atmosphere, the lander must enter at a precise angle of 12 degrees. Any different, and the lander will either burn up in the atmosphere or bounce off it back into space.
If InSight gets past this first hurdle successfully, it will then have to slow down enough to land safely. InSight will approach Mars at speeds of about 12,300 mph. The thin atmosphere will help a little, slowing the lander to about 840 mph. InSight will then deploy a parachute, and finally a set of rockets to decrease speeds to a manageable 5 mph. The goal is to have the InSight lander touch down in a nice flat spot called the Elysium Planitia.
InSight stands for “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.” Basically, this spacecraft will be studying what’s happening deeper under the surface of Mars.
InSight is the first mission ever to investigate the interior of Mars, looking at seismic activity (think: Marsquakes), the internal temperature, and how much Mars wobbles as it revolves around the Sun. This information can not only help scientists learn more about the current composition of Mars, but it can also help us understand how rocky planets form, whether life could have existed on Mars in the ancient past, what early Earth may have been like, and even about our solar system as a whole.
Interested in learning more about this breaking news story? We'll be discussing this topic throughout the week in our all-live planetarium show, "Wonders of the Night Sky," playing daily in the Jennifer Chalsty Planetarium, the biggest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere. Click here to see our full list of shows.
