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NASA's InSight Mars lander is scheduled to touch down on the Red Planet tomorrow afternoon (Nov. 26), and mission team members and agency officials are understandably nervous about the make-or-break moment. … The difficulty for landed missions stems chiefly from the fact that Mars features both a relatively strong gravitational pull and a wispy atmosphere, which is just 1 percent as thick as that of Earth, said Tom Hoffman, InSight project manager at JPL. So, approaching spacecraft get accelerated to high speeds and then have a hard time dissipating enough energy to slow down before landing, he explained during today's...

The InSight (or "Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport") lander will push through Mars' thin atmosphere using small rockets, deploy parachutes to slow its fall to the surface, and then use retro rockets to finally stick the landing. It will take about 6 minutes from the time the lander reaches the Martian atmosphere until it touches down on the surface of the Red Planet. (Of course, this is if everything goes according to plan: For example, the lander may face dust storms in the northern hemisphere where it's aiming to land. According to NASA, these autumn Martian...

NASA's Mars InSight rover is on its way to the red planet. The Atlas V rocket carrying the rover into space launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base at 4:05 a.m. on Saturday, May 5. Video http://www.ksby.com/story/38119490/rocket-carrying-mars-rover-launches-from-vandenberg-afb