Mars InSight landing – as it happened: Nasa lander touches down on Red Planet
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Your support makes all the difference.Nasa has landed on the Martian surface, hoping to drill down into the mysteries of the red planet and the rest of our solar system.
The InSight lander arrived and immediately got to work trying to understand the secrets that lie beneath Mars, for the first time ever.
The landing itself went entirely smoothly, and exactly as engineers had hoped – but perhaps not expected – it to happen. Humanity only has a 40 per cent success rate getting to the Martian surface, where the harsh atmosphere and other difficulties mean landers crash and die more than they land and succeed.
The landing came at the end of a seven-month trip from Earth. And it has been many years in the planning, marking a new interest in journeying to our closest planet and the first time Nasa has arrived on Mars in six years.
Please allow a moment for the live blog to load.
(If all is well, InSight just landed on Mars, in Mars time. We'll know if that's the case in 10 minutes or so, hopefully.)
InSight has hit peak heating, and peak deceleration, as it barrels through the atmosphere. The next big step is the parachutes being deployed, to slow it down from the 1000 metres per second to the much slower speed it needs to touch down softly.
Now InSight's radar will scan for the floor, trying to work out how high up it is to ensure that it can land softly and accurately.
(Everything is looking exactly as engineers would have hoped so far. And probably much better than they expected.)
The radar has locked on the ground! InSight now knows where it's pointing.
The lander has separated from its heat shield, dropping away as it begins the closest bit of its descent.
200 meters. 80 meters. 60 meters. 50 meters. 37 meters. 30 meters. 20 meters. 17 meters.
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