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.
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There's still a lot of anxiety to come: scientists won't know for a while whether the solar array has successfully opened up to power the Mars lander. But there's plenty of celebrating to do for now; the hardest bit is over.
Now engineers are hoping for any images to come back of the surface. These will be the first images from InSight itself, taking a picture with one of two cameras on board.
Here it is!! The first photo from the InSight lander.
What we're seeing there is a picture taken with the camera that's on the front of InSight. The grit is probably debris that might have come up when it landed on the ground.
But that's all hopefully on the dust cover, which InSight will take off later on to get a proper view.
You can also see the Martian horizon up at the back.
Applause and thanks to the two Marcos, who did their work entirely as hoped and managed to tell us everything that's going on.
We might get more pictures, too, as we get images back from the Mars orbiter that tracked InSight as it fell down. All being well we'll be able to see its parachute as it plunged down onto the surface.
The lander's afternoon is going to be just like normal, chugging along, beginning its work, making sure that everything around it is as expected and safe.
Here's that first picture, in a big and reasonably high quality version, provided by Nasa:
As a demonstration of just how international this mission is, here's the deck of the lander. (Those pictures are used to calibrate the lander, as well as the recognise the various organisations and countries that worked on getting it to Mars.)
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