NASA’s InSight missions just entered its final stage of preparations before landing on Mars. According to the US space agency, InSight will touch down on the Red Planet this month, more specifically, on November 26th. The spacecraft took off on May 5th, so it already spent almost six months flying towards Mars.
InSight is, however, the most ambitious project NASA has come up with until now and is designed to help scientists learn more about Mars planet’s interior. To achieve that, the InSight is, in reality, its a sort of a rover, a planetary probe, more precisely, equipped with a drill and a system developed to explore the geological processes that might occur in the Red Planet’s underground.
The final purpose of this ambitious mission would be to assess, once and for all, whether Mars is a dead planet or it’s still presenting significant geological activity at its interior.
NASA’s InSight Rover To Land on Mars on November 26th
“Landing on Mars is hard, and this mission is no different. It takes thousands of steps to go from the atmosphere to the surface, and each has to work perfectly,” explained Rob Manning, the mission’s chief engineer at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
NASA’s InSight mission is scheduled to land on the so-called Elysium Planitia, a smooth plain near the Red Planet’s equator. “Where we land is an intentionally dull place. It’s flat, empty and hopefully not very windy. And that is precisely what we need,” explained Neil Bowles, a UK scientist, member of the InSight mission.
“InSight will teach us about the interior of planets like our own. The mission team hopes that by studying the deep interior of Mars, we can learn how other rocky worlds, including Earth and the Moon, formed,” also said NASA’s engineers, who hope that everything would go as planned and NASA’s InSight mission will land on Mars on November 26th.
