--- title: Mars InSight Lander: Watch the Landing Live description: NASA's newest visitor to the Red Planet will probe its interior canonical: https://time.com/5459942/insight-mars-nasa-landing/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2018-11-25T12:00:43.000Z article:modified_time: 2023-12-12T16:22:36.000Z article:section: Science og:title: NASA's InSight Probe Just Landed on Mars og:description: It will give us a rare look inside the Red Planet og:url: https://time.com/5459942/insight-mars-nasa-landing/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta9422fac5f3ba3dd/69893f9d8fd2ee664e35d2ee/nasa-mars-insight.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1024 og:image:height: 576 og:image:alt: NASA Mars InSight og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: NASA's InSight Probe Just Landed on Mars twitter:description: It will give us a rare look inside the Red Planet twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta9422fac5f3ba3dd/69893f9d8fd2ee664e35d2ee/nasa-mars-insight.jpg?branch=production&width=1024&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # NASA's InSight Probe Just Landed on Mars. 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Future Proof is TIME's weekly climate and energy newsletter, written by senior correspondent Justin Worland. It connects the energy transition to the decisions reshaping business, technology, policy and markets. #### Where can I follow the energy transition as a business story? Future Proof covers climate and energy as an economic and business story rather than only an environmental one. It publishes every Friday and is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who writes Future Proof? Justin Worland, a senior correspondent at TIME and an award-winning climate journalist, writes Future Proof. #### Is Future Proof free? Yes. Future Proof is free at time.com/newsletters. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-futureproof-2026q3/newsletters?i=eada473e-3521-484f-94ff-a04492081b59&cr=time-nl-futureproof-2026q3-v1) ## Video: NASA’s Insight Mission Explained [Watch (HLS stream): NASA’s Insight Mission Explained](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/XQqydRyU.m3u8) (5:01)  _Published 2018-11-28. NASA’s Insight mission landing is the first time that a NASA spacecraft has landed on the red planet in six years._  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Updated: Dec 12, 2023 4:22 PM UTCPublished: Nov 25, 2018 12:00 PM UTC NASA’s Insight mission landing is the first time that a NASA spacecraft has landed on the red planet in six years.  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Updated: Dec 12, 2023 4:22 PM UTCPublished: Nov 25, 2018 12:00 PM UTC Humanity may be years away from setting foot on Mars, but the Red Planet is turning into something of a monument park for our species all the same. Rovers and landers—some still operating, some having completed their functional life—dot the surface, and orbiters cross the skies overhead. On November 26 at 2:47 PM EST, [one more machine](http://time.com/5262977/insight-mars-nasa/) joined the growing fleet, and it will be less concerned with what happens on or above Mars and more with what goes on within it. Launched last May on a 270-million mile arcing trajectory to Mars, the new addition to the Martian family is known as the [Mars InSight](http://time.com/5262977/insight-mars-nasa/) lander. The name is another in a series of decidedly labored but nonetheless illuminating acronyms for NASA spacecraft—in this case standing for “Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.” (The selective capitalizations are, in fairness, a step up from 2004’s Mercury MESSENGER mission, which stood for MErcury Surface Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging mission. Really.) Still, the clumsy name belies a nimble ship. InSight weighs just 1,530 lbs., including fuel and the protective aeroshell designed to help it survive the plunge through Mars’s tenuous atmosphere. It measures just 33 to 43 inches tall, depending on how far its three spindly legs compress after landing. The main body of the spacecraft is just 5 ft. wide, without its solar panels deployed. But NASA engineers have packed a lot of science into that comparatively small package. The spacecraft is equipped with a seismometer that relies on half a dozen different sensors to measure planetary perturbations in a range of frequencies; a movement and wobble sensor that detects anomalies in Mars’s rotation; and, most significantly, a deep thermal probe, which a robotic arm will hammer up to 16 ft. into the surface of the planet, far deeper than any spacecraft has dug before. What’s more, InSight isn’t traveling alone. Trailing behind on its eight-month journey to Mars have been two briefcase-sized CubeSats, deployed by the same rocket that launched InSight itself. Mostly proof-of-concept technology, they are intended to test the practicality of such mini-ships on deep space missions. While they are not essential to the overall mission, if they function as they should, they will help radio back data from InSight as it descends and lands before they sail past Mars and off into space. As with all Mars missions, the landing was the most harrowing part, with the spacecraft relying on aerobraking, a parachute system and rocket engines to touch down softly on the surface. The landing site itself, at least, will present few challenges. The most interesting parts of Mars, geologically speaking, are its most hazardous ones—areas with craters or mountains or canyons, and other landers have gone there. But InSight’s instruments can gather solid data no matter where they are on the surface, so the spacecraft aimed for Elysium Planitia, a wide plain just north of the equator that NASA has dubbed “the biggest parking lot on Mars.” It is to NASA’s credit that its [map of the landing site](https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia22232/insight-s-landing-site-elysium-planitia) includes the location of Martian landers that have come before—Viking 1, Viking 2, Pathfinder, Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity. At present, Curiosity is still at work; [Opportunity](http://time.com/5332134/nasa-opportunity-rover-15-year-anniversary/) may be, though NASA has had no contact with the old rover since last June. InSight is expected to work for at least two years, after which it too will go silent. Its time on Mars will be comparatively fleeting, but the knowledge it sends home about Earth’s closest planetary kin will endure. ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] After six months of traveling through space, the NASA insight mission landed on November 26th. It was a landing that was watched around the world, and within minutes, insight shared an official beep to signal it was alive and well, along with the photo of the martian surface where it landed. Mission control at NASA exploded into celebratory applause and cheers after the touchdown was confirmed. The project took nearly a decade to develop and ultimately cost about $ 1 billion. after the successful landing, Vice President Mike Pence called to congratulate the entire team for their efforts. Only 40 % of missions sent to the Red Planet by any space agency have been successful. And the November 26th touchdown marks the first time in six years that a NASA spacecraft has landed on the Red Planet, following 2012's Curiosity rover. The mission stands as NASA's eighth successful landing of a robot on the planet. To reach Mars, Insight cruised over 300 million miles through space followed by two cube satellites, the first to ever fly into deep space, to help flight controllers follow Insight's decent. Because of the great distance, NASA's mission scientists weren't able to directly pilot the lander. This huge engineering challenge was compounded by the fact that radio transmissions to Insight take eight minutes to reach Earth, and the robot had only 6. 5 minutes to land itself. That's a very brief window of time Time for things to go exactly right. And Insight's work on the planet is just beginning. The Mars rover is equipped with a slew of instruments to explore over the next two years a part of Mars we know little about, its deep interior. Here to discuss this major feat in interplanetary space travel and what happens next is Time editor- at- large, Jeffrey [ UNKNOWN ]. [ MUSIC ] All right, Jeffrey, thanks so much for joining us. Now, earlier we talked about Insight's successful landing. But what exactly makes a journey to Mars so challenging? Well, first of all, it's the distance. Insight traveled 290 million miles Miles over the course of six months to get to Mars. So that's a whole lot of time. When it gets there, it has to contend with the Martian atmosphere that allows them to get part way down by parachute, but the atmosphere isn't thick enough to let it get all the way to the surface. So you still need rocket engines at the end, that's a multi- part landing. Finally, it has to do all of this within just eight minutes. And essentially, it's eight minute when we Earth don't know what's going on, because it takes radio signals 8 minutes and 20 second to get to Mars, and then another 8 minutes and 20 minutes to get back. So the spacecraft, for practical purposes, is on its own, landing itself. And we have to wait until the signals come down that say it got there safely. Now, what exactly is insights mission? Insights mission is for the first time to give Mars kind of an internal check- up. Typically we land on Mars and geologically interesting places. Places with craters. Mountains and foothills because that's where the interesting geology is. This time we want to land on a flat plain. We did land on a flat plain and the objective is to get a sense of Mars's interior. Probe will be driven 16 feet into the surface to test its temperature. Scientists will be looking for marsquakes, the equivalent of earthquakes, which tell us something about the interior structure. They'll be looking for the wobble of Mars. Basically, the more we learn about Mars The more we learn about all rocky terrestrial planets like Earth, like Mars, like Venus and like Mercury. And once we do that, we learn about our solar system and all solar systems in ways we never knew before. Mm- hm, now Elon Musk has been talking about his plans to colonize Mars for years. So one, how close are we? And two, what would that even look like? We are not close and a lot of people talk about getting there in the early 2020s, that won't happen. At best we will be there in the mid 2030s. It will not be an easy or enjoyable place to live. Look, think that Earth, we adapted to live on Earth. So everything Earth has keeps us alive. Mars is almost designed to kill us. The atmosphere is only 1 % as thick as ours is. It's made almost entirely of carbon dioxide, which is toxic to us. Cosmic radiation bathes the planet in ways it doesn't on Earth. We're protected on Earth. The best analogy, and even that's not a very good one Is that living on Mars would be what it's like when scientists live for six months or eight months at a time at the South Pole. And at the South Pole at least you can go outside and breathe the air. On Mars that's not possible. So challenging to say the least. 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