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NASA Details InSight Spacecraft Mars Landing Plan

On November 26, NASA’s latest mission to Mars, InSight, will be attempting to land on the Red Planet and mark yet another success for the American space agency.
Rendering of InSight landing on Mars 1 photo
Photo: NASA
The spacecraft will be landing in an area NASA nicknamed the biggest parking lot on Mars. Scientists call it Elysium Planitia. Once there, the machine will begin probing the Martian soil to find out more about the planet’s interior.

But before getting to that, it will first have to get down to the surface. Mars’ atmosphere is only 1 percent the thickness of that on Earth, meaning there’s little stopping any object from crashing down nearly at full speed.

To get around this, once the landing craft separates from the cruise stage, it will be dropped into the atmosphere into an aeroshell. A parachute and retrorockets are used to slow the craft down. Once near the ground, landing legs come out of the craft to further absorb the impact.

Given the recent planet-wide dust storm that crippled the Opportunity rover, NASA will be on a lookout for bad weather. Using the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter already above the Red Planet, daily weather updates will be received and analyzed.

But the space agency says that even if the weather turns bad, the inSight should not be affected, as it has been designed to survive even sandstorms.

The landing of the spacecraft will be documented by a pair of CubeSats that are accompanying the mission.
Once this difficult landing part is over, the InSight will try and get a better understanding of the place humanity might sometime call its second home.

Various instruments will be used to look for quakes, perturbations of Mars' rotation axis, information about the planet's core or the amount of heat escaping from underneath.

InSight was built back in 2010 and was initially planned to travel to Mars in 2016. Because of a failure to one of the instruments, the launch was canceled and rescheduled for this year.

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About the author: Daniel Patrascu
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Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies.
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