NASA's InSight mission survives 'seven minutes of terror' to land on Mars

NASA is back on Mars.

The space agency’s InSight mission survived a fiery plunge through the Red Planet’s thin atmosphere just before 3 p.m. EST Monday, deploying a supersonic parachute and firing retro-rockets to touch down softly on a flat plain near the Martian equator.

Engineers manning consoles at NASA’s Jet Propulsion laboratory in California erupted in cheers, hugs and high-fives at the confirmation that the mission launched nearly seven months earlier was poised to start the first study of the Red Planet’s interior, from crust to core.

Applause broke out again minutes later when the lander returned its first picture, a dirt-spattered view of a rust-colored and apparently flat horizon.

"It was intense, and you could feel the emotion," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who was in the control room and received congratulatory calls from President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. "What an amazing day for our country."

Viewers gathered at watch parties to see the landing attempt, which was shown live in New York’s Times Square, among other places around the globe. They witnessed NASA's — and humanity's — eighth successful touchdown on Mars, and the first since the Curiosity rover six years ago. 

The $814 million InSight mission launched May 5 aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California — the nation's first interplanetary mission not to fly from Cape Canaveral.

On Monday, the spacecraft dropped its cruise stage a little after 2:30 p.m. and prepared to hit a precise spot in Mars’ upper atmosphere at 12,300 mph.

That marked the start of what NASA has dubbed “seven minutes of terror” — the plunge to the surface.

A heat shield weathered temperatures up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. A parachute braked the spacecraft’s fall to below supersonic speed. The lander then shed the heat shield and a backshell, fired a dozen retro-rockets and deployed three shock-absorbing legs before landing in a cloud of dust.

The mission team learned about each event roughly eight minutes after it had actually happened, because of the time it took radio signals to travel the 91 million miles back to Earth.

In a “first” for NASA, a crucial communications link was provided by a pair of briefcase-sized experimental satellites called CubeSats, which trailed InSight by about 3,000 miles. Named Mars Cube One, or MarCO, the tiny deep space explorers relayed a steady stream of data during InSight's drop to the surface.

At JPL, engineers wearing maroon mission shirts and armed with lucky peanuts cheered as telemetry confirmed each milestone.

The 789-pound lander built by Lockheed Martin is now parked in Elysium Planitia, a “heavenly plain” that mission managers hoped would be flat and free of rocks.

Tom Hoffman, the mission's project manager at JPL, said the landing was a near-bull's eye, and the first image showed encouraging conditions on the ground, revealing only one rock that might have posed a threat.

"I’m very, very happy that it looks like we have an incredibly safe and boring-looking landing location," said Hoffman. "It does indeed look to be pretty much like a parking lot."

Insight’s arrival was cause for celebration because of how difficult it was to achieve. Fewer than half of all missions launched to Mars have reached the planet.

But the excitement had to be tempered slightly by a nearly six-hour wait, until a pass by the Mars Odyssey orbiter, to confirm that critical power-generating solar arrays had unfurled properly.

That process was expected to begin after a short pause to let the dust kicked up by the lander settle. 

The landing also represented only the start of a minimum two-year science mission that faces a series of early challenges, including deploying its instruments.

NASA, KSC seek new champion after Bill Nelson's loss

It's official: SpaceX will target January for first uncrewed flight

“Everything up to now has just been a prologue,” said Bruce Banerdt, the mission’s lead scientist from JPL. “It feels like a climax, but it’s actually the beginning.”

Over several months, InSight will become the first NASA mission to use a robotic arm to lift several science instruments, provided by European partners, from the lander's deck onto the surface of Mars.

A seismometer will measure marsquakes and meteorite strikes. Waves generated by those events will act like flashbulbs allowing scientists to see down through rocks and produce a 3-D picture of Mars’ interior structure, said Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s lead scientist at JPL.

"That is the goal of the InSight mission, is to actually map out the inside of Mars in three dimensions so that we understand the inside of Mars as well as we have come to understand the surface of Mars," said Banerdt.

In doing so, InSight — short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport — is peering back in time to the early solar system.

Plate tectonics, mantle convection and erosion have changed Earth’s interior and crust over eons, but Mars retains a record of what it looked like soon after it formed.

“When we look at the crust of Mars, that’s a snapshot into the past, of what the crust of the Earth might have looked like 4.5 billion years ago, before it got all busy,” said Banerdt.

That knowledge will inform understanding of how rocky bodies like the Earth and the moon form and evolve. It could help determine whether planets in other solar systems might be habitable.

InSight also will take Mars' temperature, by hammering a mechanical mole up to 16 feet underground to measure the flow of heat from within. And it will measure the planet's slight wobble as it orbits, providing more information about its structure.

Banerdt said it will take about two years to collect the data needed to answer InSight's "deep questions," depending on how many quakes Mars has in store for the mission.

"We just love that shaking," he said. "The more shaking it does, the better we can see the inside."

Contact Dean at 321-917-4534 or jdean@floridatoday.com. And follow on Twitter at @flatoday_jdean and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/FlameTrench.

Support local journalism: Subscribe at floridatoday.com/subscribe