Space nerds, rejoice! NASA's InSight spacecraft just landed on Mars
NASA just showed us all how to land on Mars... again.
At about 2:54 p.m. ET, mission controllers on Earth got word that the space agency's InSight lander -- designed to study the red planet's interior -- successfully landed on Mars about 8 minutes earlier. (It takes 8 minutes and 7 seconds for a signal from Mars to reach us Earthlings.)
Assuming the spacecraft's upcoming checkouts prove it to be healthy, InSight's successful touchdown marks the 8th time NASA has managed to softly land and operate a rover or lander on the red planet.
The American space agency remains the only organization to ever successfully land a rover or lander on Mars.
InSight isn't totally out of the woods yet, however. Now we have to wait about 5 hours before we find out if the spacecraft successfully unfurled its solar arrays after landing.
It was a tense 6.5 minutes in mission control as InSight plunged through the thin Martian atmosphere at 12,300 mph on its way to landing.
But it all worked out perfectly.
The spacecraft detached its heat shield at just the right time, released its parachute, and extended its landing legs.
Once it got close enough to the ground, InSight's 12 engines ignited, slowing the craft down enough to gently touch down on the red world.
And now the fun can begin.
InSight -- which launched to space in May -- is a special kind of lander.
While other rovers and landers -- like the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers -- are designed to investigate the Martian surface, InSight will sit in one place and methodically investigate Mars' inner life.
"We've studied Mars from orbit and from the surface since 1965, learning about its weather, atmosphere, geology and surface chemistry," NASA's acting director of the planetary science division Lori Glaze said in a statement.
"Now we finally will explore inside Mars and deepen our understanding of our terrestrial neighbor as NASA prepares to send human explorers deeper into the solar system."
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The lander will use its sensitive instrumentation to learn more about "marsquakes" that shake the planet every now and then.
Unlike quakes on Earth, marsquakes aren't the result of tectonic activity. Instead, scientists think these shakes are created as Martian rock slowly cools.
InSight will effectively be able to map the Martian interior as these quakes hit.
The lander is also expected to piece together the history of Mars formed by studying its interior, information that could help us understand the formation of planets outside of our solar system in the future.
"Some of the ever-increasing number of exoplanets identified around stars other than our sun may be similarly rocky and layered, though Earthlike worlds are smaller than the giant exoplanets whose size makes them easiest to find," NASA said in a press release earlier this year.
InSight wasn't alone during its trip to Mars.
The lander was joined on its journey to the red planet by two small cube-shaped satellites -- called cubesats, appropriately enough -- that were expected to beam data back to Earth during InSight's landing.
This marked the first time any space agency has sent tiny satellites like these -- named MarCO-A and MarCO-B -- into deep space.
"These are our scouts," Andy Klesh, MarCO's chief engineer, said in a statement.
"CubeSats haven't had to survive the intense radiation of a trip to deep space before, or use propulsion to point their way towards Mars. We hope to blaze that trail."
In the next few months, InSight will begin its work on Mars, helping humans living millions of miles away learn more about our rusty neighbor.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
