NASA's InSight lander touches down on Mars to study its interior
The spacecraft arrived safely on the Martian surface, beginning a mission to probe the planet's deep interior for the first time.
NASA's InSight spacecraft touched down safely on the surface of Mars this year, surviving the harrowing descent through the thin Martian atmosphere to begin an ambitious mission to probe the deep interior of the Red Planet for the first time, offering a new window into how rocky worlds form and evolve.
The landing, always the most perilous phase of any Mars mission, unfolded in tense silence at mission control before confirmation arrived that the craft had reached the surface intact, prompting celebration among the engineers and scientists who had worked for years toward the moment.
Unlike the rovers that had explored the Martian surface, InSight was a stationary lander designed to study what lies beneath. Its instruments included a highly sensitive seismometer to detect marsquakes and a probe intended to burrow into the ground to measure the heat flowing from the planet's interior.
By listening for the seismic waves generated by quakes and meteorite impacts rippling through the planet, scientists hoped to map the structure of the Martian interior, its crust, mantle and core, and to learn how the planet had formed and cooled over billions of years.
Understanding the interior of Mars promised insights not only into that planet but into the formation of rocky worlds in general, including Earth, whose own early geological history has been largely erased by the churning of plate tectonics and erosion.
The mission faced challenges, including difficulties with the heat probe, but the seismometer proved a success, recording quakes and beginning to reveal the hidden structure of the planet. InSight's arrival marked another milestone in humanity's long campaign to explore and understand Mars, extending the reach of robotic exploration from the surface into the very heart of another world.