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 .
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”.
