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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And here's the anxious members of the media as the lander made its way down.
Engineers are warning that there's now a big wait. As well as the hours we have to wait until the solar arrays are out and working, we're actually going to have to wait for months to get substantial science data back.
An important part of the mission is about to happen in about half an hour: the mission control team at JPL – who guided InSight down to the ground – will hand over to the team tasked with making sure it's safe while it's on the surface.
Here's an even brighter and clearer version of that first picture.
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