Mars probe set for 7 minutes of terror
Nasa's top scientists admitted to sleepless nights, sweaty palms, stomach aches and moments of pure terror as their $993 million Mars Insight spacecraft approaches a high-drama finale: landing on Mars.
The high drama of the entry, descent and landing phase was set to begin at 1940 GMT yesterday at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
A carefully orchestrated sequence -- already fully preprogrammed on board the spacecraft -- takes place over the next several minutes, coined "six and a half minutes of terror."
The site is roughly 373 miles (600 km) from the 2012 landing spot of the car-sized Mars rover Curiosity, the last spacecraft sent to the Red Planet by Nasa.
Mars Insight's goal is to listen for quakes and tremors as a way to unveil the Red Planet's inner mysteries, how it formed billions of years ago, and by extension, how other rocky planets like Earth took shape.
The unmanned spacecraft launched nearly seven months ago, and is Nasa's first to attempt to touch down on Earth's neighboring planet since the Curiosity rover arrived in 2012.
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