After a nail-biting landing, here's what's next for Mars InSight

It’s notoriously hard to land on Mars, yet NASA managed just that with its recent InSight lander, writes Bob Myhill.

From childhood, I’ve loved watching landings and other spacecraft manoeuvres on TV – always feeling a bit of that edge of the seat excitement. But it didn’t prepare me for the feeling of watching a mission I’ve worked on. Each period of silence during the seven-minute descent of InSight felt like an eternity, with time re-exerting itself only during call outs from systems engineer Christine Szalai. I will never forget the joy of the moment when she finally announced “touchdown confirmed”.