SomethingIsHappening; Associated Press (ap.org via mail.com); Editors, Wisdom Quarterly
Mars landing looms for NASA; anxiety building a day out
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida - NASA's InSight spacecraft aimed for a bull's-eye touchdown on Mars [and made it today], zooming in like an arrow with no turning back.
InSight's journey took six months and [allegedly] 300 million miles (482 million km) comes to a precarious grand finale Monday afternoon.
The
robotic geologist [shown on right] -- designed to explore Mars' insides, surface to core [but has no capacity whatsoever to detect signs of life, present or ancient] -- must go from 12,300 mph (19,800 kph) to zero in six minutes flat as it pierces the Martian atmosphere, pops out a parachute, fires its descent engines and, scientists hope, lands on three legs.
It is NASA's first attempt to land on Mars in six years, and all those involved are understandably anxious. NASA's top science mission official, Thomas Zurbuchen, confided Sunday that his stomach is already churning.
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| Secret: Earthling-humans are already present |
The hardest thing is sitting on his hands and doing nothing, he said, except hoping and praying everything goes perfectly for InSight.
"Landing on Mars is one of the hardest single jobs that people have to do in planetary exploration," noted InSight's lead scientist, Bruce Banerdt. "It's such a difficult thing, it's such a dangerous thing that there's always a fairly uncomfortably large chance that something could go wrong."
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| How fake must it be for anyone to notice? |
Earth's success rate at Mars is 40 percent, counting every attempted flyby, orbital flight and landing by the U.S., Russia and other countries dating all the way back to 1960. But the U.S. has pulled off seven successful Mars landings in the past four decades.
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NASA spacecraft lands on red planet after six-month journey
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This is more fake than the stuff I'm famous for
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida - A NASA spacecraft designed to burrow beneath the surface of Mars landed on the red planet Monday after a six-month...journey and a perilous, six-minute descent through the rose-hued atmosphere.
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The AP story changes
"Flawless": NASA craft lands on Mars after perilous journey
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida - A NASA spacecraft designed to drill down into Mars' interior landed on the planet Monday after a perilous, supersonic plunge through its red skies, setting off jubilation among scientists who had waited in white-knuckle suspense for confirmation to arrive across 100 million miles of space.
An engineer smiles next to an image of Mars sent from the InSight lander shortly after it landed on Mars in the mission support area of the space flight operation facility at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Monday, Nov. 26, 2018, in Pasadena, California (Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via AP, pool).
Flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, leapt out of their chairs, screaming, dancing, and hugging, upon learning that InSight's had safely arrived on Mars, the graveyard for a multitude of previous missions.
