After six months travelling, Nasa’s spacecraft should land on Mars on Monday
The site is roughly 600km from the 2012 landing spot of the car-sized Mars rover Curiosity, the last spacecraft sent to the Red Planet by Nasa
Los Angeles — Nasa’s first robotic lander designed to study the deep interior of a distant world hurtled closer to Mars on course for a planned touchdown on Monday, after a six-month voyage through space. Travelling 548-million kilometres from Earth, the Mars InSight spacecraft was due to reach its destination on the dusty, rock-strewn surface of the Red Planet at about 8pm GMT). The mission control team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) near Los Angeles prepared to conduct a final adjustment to the InSight's flight path on Sunday to manoeuvre the spacecraft closer toward its entry point over Mars. If all goes according to plan, InSight will streak into the pink Martian sky nearly 24 hours later at 19,310km/h. Its 124km descent to the surface will be slowed by atmospheric friction, a giant parachute and retro rockets. When it lands six-and-a-half minutes later, it will be traveling a mere 8km/h. The stationary probe, launched from California in May, will then pause for 16 mi...
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