Watch InSight's successful landing on Mars: Difference between revisions

Coverage began at 2 p.m. Eastern (7 p.m. UTC). Landing started about 40 minutes later, the entire landing telemetry was streamed live through the briefcase sized Mars Cube One interplanetary "cube sats", and at around 3.01 p.m. EST they got first confirmation of the landing. First image from the surface arrived several minutes later, relayed through the cube sats, and the landing went without a hitch. See the timeline here [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-insight-landing-on-mars-milestones NASA Landing on Mars milestones]

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: Archived live broadcast of the landing

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: Inside Mission control with 360 degree vision during the EDL

: For more details: [https://mars.nasa.gov/insight/timeline/landing/watch-online/ Watch Online]

[[File:NASA-InSightLander-FirstImageFrom Mars-20181126.png|thumb|center|500px|First image from the Mars Insight lander. The dusty lens cover will be removed - it was there to protect the camera from dust thrown up by the landing itself]]Some points of interest about this mission:

==First robotic mole==

* For astrobiologists, one particularly interesting thing about this lander is that it is the first one to use a robotic mole. It will drill to a depth of 16 feet (about 5 meters). This is of interest for astrobiology, especially for the search for past life. ExoMars will be able to drill to 2 meters using a different technique and nothing else has been able to drill to anything like this depth. Viking scraped a shallow trench and most just drill mms into rocks. InSight is not an astrobiology mission; it's drilling in order to get a heat profile and learn about heat flows to help study the Mars interior. But it is the first test of robotic mole technology on Mars.