- It's Monday afternoon.
I'm here at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory
because in just a few minutes, NASA is about to land
its latest probe on Mars.
- [Radio Voice] All stations assistance
we can confirm we are entry minus 20 minutes.
- Its name is InSight.
It'll be the first lander to study the interior of Mars.
We've been following this mission since it launched in May
from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
And we were actually there for the launch,
though we didn't actually see anything.
Well, there's a rocket in there somewhere.
The launch was a success.
And now, more than six months later,
we're here to see the next phase of InSight's mission begin.
But first, the probe has to get to the surface in one piece.
And landing on Mars is an incredibly intense feat.
A process that has claimed the lives of numerous robots
over the last 50 years.
So, we're here for the landing with some of the people
leading the InSight mission.
And we're all holding our breath.
InSight's mission is unlike that
of any other spacecraft we've sent to Mars.
All of our past Mars probes
have studied the planet's environment above ground.
But InSight is focused on what's underneath the surface.
It'll be listening for Marsquakes,
or whenever the planet shakes,
to determine what kind of material
makes up the red plant's mantle and core.
Each time a quake occurs, InSight will study the structure
of the seismic waves as they pass through the planet,
using that information like an ultrasound
to find out what is lurking underneath the crust.
Of course, InSight and its instruments
had to make it all the way to Mars first.
Farah Alibay is a Payload Systems Engineer for InSight,
which means all those instruments are her responsibility.
We caught up with Farah during the launch in May,
and she told us she'd be busy during InSight's long cruise.
- So during cruise, we actually prepare for landing.
So we'll do the instrument check out
to make sure everything's healthy.
But we also do things like dress rehearsals for landing
and for landing days because the first time
that you're doing a deployment,
the first time that you are taking a picture,
you don't want that to be the first time
that you've built that command and sent it.
So we actually do like full on, week-long dress rehearsals.
And then there's something called,
we sometimes have gremlins as part of the team
that will inject errors so they'll either give us false data
or they'll literally like take someone out of a room,
or say someone's sick, or feed us wrong information.
- Yeah. I want to be a NASA gremlin.
That sounds like the funnest job.
- And because I have to practice,
I don't get to be the gremlin.
- Oh, no!
Practice is key because landing on Mars is super tough.
The planet has enough atmosphere
to heat the spacecraft up during its descent to the ground,
but not enough to slow it down fully with parachutes alone.
That's why InSight was designed with a very complex
landing routine.
Equipped with a heat shield, InSight hits the atmosphere
at 12,300 miles per hour
and heats up to a peak of 2700 degrees Fahrenheit.
The air slows down the vehicle
to less than 1000 miles per hour, and at seven miles up
the spacecraft deploys a supersonic parachute
to slow it down even further.
Eventually, the lander drops away
and uses its own onboard thrusters
to land gently on the ground.
It's all very complicated and every little piece
has to go exactly right.
Fortunately, the mission team has picked a landing site
that will make things a little easier.
Ingrid Daubar is a research scientist at JPL
who helped picked where the spacecraft will touch down.
What goes into picking a landing site for this mission?
- We ended up picking the flattest, most boring place
on Mars to land.
Which isn't very exciting on the surface,
but because InSight is studying the interior of Mars,
we can kind of do that from anywhere on Mars.
We're trying to avoid anything that might interfere
with the landing sequence of the spacecraft.
So any kind of steep slope, or rock.
If the lander happened to settle, for example,
in a crater with steep walls,
it might end up tilted on its side.
That might mean that it might have trouble
deploying the solar arrays, for example.
If it was really tilted the solar arrays
would kind of hit the ground.
So that would be bad.
- But you also have picked mini landing spot,
not for InSight but for its instruments.
So explain how that works.
- Once InSight lands,
then we actually deploy the instruments
onto the surface of Mars.
And to do that, there'll be kind of a limited workspace
in front of the spacecraft where we can put them
where the arm can reach.
- The seismometer is so sensitive
that it needs to be deployed
as far away from the other machinery as possible.
Farah saw why when she tested the instrument in Colorado.
- And when we did that, all the way
at Lockheed Martin in Littleton, Colorado,
we could hear waves in the Pacific
and the Atlantic crashing.
And you could see that in the noise.
So it's incredibly sensitive.
- With all that prep in place, it's almost time for landing.
But we won't actually get to see it happen live.
There aren't any cameras on Mars, and one light signal
takes eight minutes to reach here on Earth.
Everything has to be automated.
But if all goes well, the lander will send out
an I'm OK beep when it gets to the ground.
When that happens, you'll see a lot of happy engineers.
- Standing by for parachute deploy.
600 meters.
Gravity turn, altitude 400 meters.
300 meters.
200 meters.
50 meters. Constant velocity.
17 meters.
Standing by for touchdown.
Touchdown confirmed!
(applause)
- Let's just wait and see what they saw.
There it is! Wow!
- I am so excited, also exhausted.
It's an incredible feeling.
I don't even know how to explain it, right?
It's my whole career, MarCO and InSight
were both successful.
Everything went well.
I mean I don't think I imagined it would go this well,
even in my wildest dreams.
I don't know how to describe it.
- It's definitely a feeling of extreme relief
here in the auditorium.
Everybody was dead silent right up until the end,
and when we got that confirmation of landing,
everyone just breathed a huge sigh.
We can all celebrate a new spacecraft
on the surface of Mars.