NASA’s InSight lander travels 300 million miles to land on Mars

In a first of its kind, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) managed to achieve a successful touchdown on Mars by a lander called InSight at 19:53 GMT. After seven months of travelling through space, spanning more than 300 million miles, the InSight probe—which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat transport—confirmed the successful landing by a “beep”. This affirmation was soon followed by an image taken by a camera mounted on the lander that described the area in front of the probe.

This image helped ground control to reassure the accuracy of the landing on Mars. The black specks in the image are the dust particles on the camera’s lens and the object to the left is a Martian rock. The protrusion to the right is the lander’s footpad.

Having sent rovers to Mars before, the transport of a lander presented a more challenging problem for the NASA team. Due to its stationary nature, the landing of the InSight probe had to be accurate because it would have been impossible to move it to a better location. Thanks to the accuracy of the research and the predicted path, the lander achieved perfect touchdown without any serious setbacks to its expected journey.

The probe’s journey began on May 5 and was expected to use the already existing Odyssey spacecraft orbiting Mars for communications relay with the ground station. This plan faced a hurdle as the Odyssey spacecraft failed to be present at the right position to provide for a direct path for the InSight probe. In an interview that was streamed by NASA TV’s media channel alongside the scenes of the control room during the landing, JPL director Dr Mike Watkins described how the team “embarked on this kind of a crazy idea” to build and use cube satellites or CubeSats to counter this communication problem. The mission saw the first extra-orbital operation of CubeSats and their sole purpose was to do the relay between the lander and the ground station. This ingenious step made it possible for the control team here on Earth to get a better sense of InSight’s journey and travel.

Future endeavours

Using already tested technology, InSight employed a parachute, 11.73 metres in diameter, and retrorockets to slow down its descent as it landed on Mars. The instruments on board the probe aim to study the internal structure of the planet including the planet’s seismic patterns, its ground’s thermal gradient and the composition of its crust, mantle and core. The data provided by these devices would be used to sketch out a better structure for human travel to Mars in the future, in terms of established structures, soil conditions, and more.

The probe would make use of a robotic arm to place the instruments on the Martian land and this in itself would take two to three months to accomplish. Having landed at Elysium Planitia, an area that scientists label as “open, flat, safe and boring”, the probe is expected to have a silent two-year mission.

Along with the success of a landing at Mars, this mission also exhibited the durability and possibility of small planetary spacecraft in future missions. The CubeSats provided scientists with a deeper insight into the working of this unique kind of science, which as Michael Watkins pointed out, opened a new door to future space missions.