Mars InSight landing – as it happened: Nasa lander touches down on Red Planet

Nasa control room celebrates following landing of InSight mission of Mars surface

Nasa has landed on the Martian surface, hoping to drill down into the mysteries of the red planet and the rest of our solar system.

The InSight lander arrived and immediately got to work trying to understand the secrets that lie beneath Mars, for the first time ever.

The landing itself went entirely smoothly, and exactly as engineers had hoped – but perhaps not expected – it to happen. Humanity only has a 40 per cent success rate getting to the Martian surface, where the harsh atmosphere and other difficulties mean landers crash and die more than they land and succeed.

The landing came at the end of a seven-month trip from Earth. And it has been many years in the planning, marking a new interest in journeying to our closest planet and the first time Nasa has arrived on Mars in six years.

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[26 November 2018 19:02 · Andrew Griffin]

While the lander will take about seven minutes to get to the ground, any signals going back over all that distance will take a full 8 minutes to get to us. That means the entire process will be over before we even know it's started, literally.

[26 November 2018 19:06 · Andrew Griffin]

Nasa's TV's live coverage is, well, live! You can watch along here.

None of the landing is happening yet, but it's got some great explanation of what's actually going on today.

[26 November 2018 19:08 · Andrew Griffin]

Nasa engineers are explaining how yesterday they sent the spacecraft's last software update. That fine tuned some of the calculation so it knows how to guide itself down to the planet. And that's extra important because it has to guide itself entirely – it's so far away that we couldn't drive the craft even if we wanted to. So it's fate is sealed – there's nothing anyone can do now.

[26 November 2018 19:15 · Andrew Griffin]

How will we know what's going on? Hopefully by receiving messages from two little cube satellites, named WALL-E and EVE after the main characters in the 2008 animated film, which will be watching InSight as it drops to the surface. They should be able to send back signals near-instantly – but there's no guarantee the technology, which is still being tested out, will actually work.

In the past we'd get that real-time data from an orbiter, but we don't have that this time around. Instead, we'll be getting messages back from a different orbiter, as well as trying to watch it as it happens on Earth. But the former takes a long time and the latter is just snapshots.

All of this will just be only to ensure that we know what's going on – it doesn't affect the mission. The lander can land itself.

[26 November 2018 19:17 · Andrew Griffin]

On Nasa TV, engineers are explaining that we won't really know if everything's good for about five hours after InSight has dropped onto the surface. That's because it doesn't open up its solar array for a while, to ensure the dust has settled first.

[26 November 2018 19:23 · Andrew Griffin]

There's been some fear about dust storms. They're not an unknown event on Mars: the Opportunity rover appears to have been killed by one earlier this year.

But it's probably OK: we know that everything is fairly calm at the moment, from orbiters that are going around Mars. And since it is so far away and conditions so unpredictable, InSight had to be built to ensure it could land in any conditions anyway.

[26 November 2018 19:30 · Andrew Griffin]

The accuracy required is like throwing a basketball out of a stadium in Los Angeles and having it land in a specific hoop in New York City – one that just so happens to be moving quickly and spinning around!

[26 November 2018 19:32 · Andrew Griffin]

Here's Nasa's big map of events where people can watch along at home. They're even in Madagascar!

And people in Times Square will even get to see it on the huge Nasdaq tower.

[26 November 2018 19:32 · Andrew Griffin]

Everything's looking good so far, say engineers – they're in touch with both InSight itself and the CubeSats.

[26 November 2018 19:34 · Andrew Griffin]

"They're both healthy, and they're both doing great," says one engineer of the pair of briefcase-sized satellites. (Nasa is stubbornly referring to them as "– their official name – rather than the infinitely cuter Wall-E inspired monikers.)