Five Things to Know About InSight's Mars Landing
NASA engineers will be holding their breath when their spacecraft heads into Mars' atmosphere on Nov. 26.
Every Mars landing is a knuckle-whitening feat of
engineering. But each attempt has its own quirks based on where a spacecraft is
going and what kind of science the mission intends to gather.On Nov. 26, NASA will try to safely set a new spacecraft
on Mars. InSight is a lander dedicated to studying the deep interior of the
planet - the first mission ever to do so.Here are a few things to know about InSight's landing.Landing on Mars is hardOnly about 40 percent of the missions
ever sent to Mars - by any space agency - have been successful. The U.S. is the
only nation whose missions have survived a Mars landing. The thin atmosphere - just
1 percent of Earth's - means that there's little friction to slow down a
spacecraft. Despite that, NASA has had a long and successful track record at
Mars. Since 1965, it has flown by, orbited, landed on and roved across the
surface of the Red Planet.When NASA's InSight descends to the Red Planet on Nov. 26, 2018, it is guaranteed to be a white-knuckle event. Rob Manning, chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explains the critical steps that must happen in perfect sequence to get the robotic lander safely to the surface.InSight uses tried-and-true technologyIn 2008, NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena, California, successfully landed the Phoenix spacecraft
at Mars' North Pole. InSight is based on the Phoenix spacecraft, both of which
were built by Lockheed Martin Space in Denver. Despite tweaks to its heat
shield and parachute, the overall landing design is still very much the same: After
separating from a cruise stage, an aeroshell descends through the atmosphere.
The parachute and retrorockets slow the spacecraft down, and suspended legs
absorb some shock from the touchdown.InSight is landing on "the biggest
parking lot on Mars"One of the benefits of InSight's
science instruments is that they can record equally
valuable data regardless of where they are on the planet. That frees the
mission from needing anything more complicated than a flat, solid surface
(ideally with few boulders and rocks). For the mission's team, the landing site
at Elysium Planitia is sometimes thought as "the biggest parking lot on
Mars."InSight was built to land in a dust
stormInSight's engineers have built a tough
spacecraft, able to touch down safely in a dust storm if it needs to. The
spacecraft's heat shield is designed to be thick enough to withstand being "sandblasted"
by dust. Its parachute has suspension lines that were tested to be stronger
than Phoenix's, in case it faces more air resistance due to the atmospheric
conditions expected during a dust storm.The entry, descent and landing sequence
also has some flexibility to handle shifting weather. The mission team will be
receiving daily weather updates from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in the
days before landing so that they can tweak when InSight's parachute deploys and
when it uses radar to find the Martian surface.After landing, InSight will provide new
science about rocky planetsInSight will teach us about the
interior of planets like our own. The mission team hopes that by studying the
deep interior of Mars, we can learn how other rocky worlds, including Earth and
the Moon, formed. Our home planet and Mars were molded from the same primordial
stuff more than 4.5 billion years ago but then became quite different. Why
didn't they share the same fate?When it comes to rocky planets, we've
only studied one in detail: Earth. By comparing Earth's interior to that of
Mars, InSight's team members hope to better understand our solar system. What
they learn might even aid the search for Earth-like exoplanets, narrowing down
which ones might be able to support life. So while InSight is a Mars mission,
it's also much more than a Mars mission.You can read more about how the science of the mission is
uniquehere. Apress
kitreleased today includes additional information on the mission.JPL manages InSight for NASA's Science
Mission Directorate. InSight is part of NASA's Discovery Program, managed by
the agency's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Lockheed
Martin Space in Denver built the InSight spacecraft, including its cruise stage
and lander, and supports spacecraft operations for the mission.A number of European partners, including
France's Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace
Center (DLR), are supporting the InSight mission. CNES provided the Seismic
Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) instrument, with
significant contributions from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System
Research (MPS) in Germany, the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Switzerland,
Imperial College and Oxford University in the United Kingdom, and JPL. DLR
provided the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3) instrument, with
significant contributions from the Polish Space Agency (CBK) and Astronika in
Poland. Spain's Centro de Astrobiología (CAB) supplied the wind sensors.Read more
about InSight here:https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/