NASA's InSight Mars Lander Touches Down Today - Touchdown Confirmed!!

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NASA's $850 million InSight lander will arrive at the Red Planet on the afternoon of Nov. 26, hopefully amid a flurry of celebratory whoops akin to those elicited by the successful touchdown of the Curiosity Mars rover on Aug. 5, 2012.



The most crucial steps for InSight include aligning itself to hit the Martian atmosphere at precisely a 12-degree angle (any shallower, and it will bounce off; any steeper, and it will burn up); deploying its supersonic parachute and then its landing legs; and firing up its descent engines for the final touchdown.

All of this happens within a mere 6 minutes — InSight's travel time in the Red Planet air. (Curiosity's "7 minutes of terror" entry, descent and landing sequence lasted a bit longer because the heavy rover employed a different touchdown strategy: It was lowered to the Martian surface on cables by a rocket-powered sky crane.)

InSight will land not far from Curiosity, on a flat, boring plain called Elysium Planitia

Wiki

InSight is a robotic lander designed to study the interior of the planet Mars.[10][11] The mission launched on 5 May 2018 at 11:05 UTC[12] and is expected to land on the surface of Mars at Elysium Planitia on 26 November 2018,[4][13] where it will deploy a seismometer and burrow a heat probe. It will also perform a radio science experiment to study the internal structure of Mars.[14]

InSight's objective is to place a stationary lander equipped with a seismometer called SEIS produced by the French space agency CNES, and measure heat transfer with a heat probe called HP3 produced by the German space agency DLR to study the planet's early geological evolution. This could bring new understanding of the Solar System's terrestrial planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars — and the Earth's Moon. By reusing technology from the Mars Phoenix lander, which successfully landed on Mars in 2008, it is expected that the cost and risk will be reduced.[1]