Nasa’s new Mars spacecraft lands Monday – if it survives perilous ‘six-and-a-half minutes of terror’
- The lander is the first to reach Mars since 2012, when Nasa’s Curiosity rover touched down to scour the surface
- Of 43 other international attempts to send orbiters, probes, landers or rovers to Mars, 25 have not made it
A spacecraft that cost nearly a billion dollars is on course to make a perilous landing Monday on Mars, if it can survive a high-speed approach and the scorching heat of entering the Red Planet’s atmosphere, a process Nasa has nicknamed “six-and-a-half minutes of terror”.
“There is very little room for things to go wrong,” said Rob Grover, head of the entry, descent and landing team at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
If successful, the entry, descent and landing of the Mars InSight – designed to be the first mission to listen to the interior of another planet and reveal how rocky planets formed – will add another success to Nasa’s record when it comes to sending spacecraft to Mars.
So far the United States is the only nation to have made it there, and only Nasa’s unmanned Curiosity robotic rover is still tooling around on the surface. The space agency’s older, smaller Opportunity was roaming around up there until June, when a global dust storm knocked it out of service.
But if InSight fails, it certainly won’t be the first.
Of 43 other international attempts to send orbiters, probes, landers or rovers to Mars, 25 have not made it.