NASA's InSight spacecraft lands on Mars after 6 months

Pasadena, California, Nov 27: NASA's InSight spacecraft landed on Mars to explore the deep interior of the Red Planet. It was NASA's ninth attempt to land at Mars since the 1976 Viking probes. All but one of the previous U.S. touchdowns were successful.

InSight is a robotic lander designed to study the interior of the planet Mars. The mission launched on 5 May 2018 at 11:05 UTC and landed on the surface of Mars at Elysium Planitia on 26 November 2018, at approximately 2:54 pm ET after a journey of nearly 300 million miles, where it will deploy a seismometer and burrow a heat probe.

It will also perform a series of radio science experiments to complement the studies of the internal structure and rotation of Mars.

The three-legged InSight spacecraft reached the surface after being slowed by a parachute and braking engines, the space agency said. Updates were coming in via radio signals that take more than eight minutes to cross the nearly 100 million miles (160 million kilometres) between Mars and Earth.