Nasa is hoping to make a historic landing on Mars today.

At 7.53pm UK time this evening, Nasa’s Insight Mars lander will touch down on the Red Planet after a journey of more than 300 million miles.

First, it will plough into the Martian atmosphere at 12,300 miles per hour before slowing down to 5 miles per hour – human jogging speed – in just seven minutes and then landing on its three legs.

A Nasa artist’s impression of the Insight spaceship soaring through the atmosphere of Mars (Picture: Nasa)

‘Landing on Mars is hard. It takes skill, focus and years of preparation,’ said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at Nasa.


‘Keeping in mind our ambitious goal to eventually send humans to the surface of the Moon and then Mars, I know that our incredible science and engineering team – the only in the world to have successfully landed spacecraft on the Martian surface – will do everything they can to successfully land InSight on the Red Planet.’



It will be the first mission to study the ‘deep interior’ of Mars

The lander will dig deeper into Mars than ever before, reaching a depth of roughly 5 metres.

Nasa artist’s impression of the Insight lander touching down on Mars

It will also attempt to make the first measurements of Marsquakes, using a seismometer placed directly on the Martian surface.

Nasa wrote: ‘The landing will kick off a two-year mission in which InSight will become the first spacecraft to study Mars’ deep interior.

‘Its data also will help scientists understand the formation of all rocky worlds, including our own.’

The robotic geologist – armed with a hammer and quake monitor – will drill deep into the crust where it will explore the rumblings of Mars in a bid to uncover the secrets of its ancient history.

The Atlas-V rocket with the NASA InSight spacecraft aboard pictured just before take off (Picture: EPA/Nasa/Bill Ingalls)

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It will touch down on a flat, smooth plain close to the planet’s equator called the Elysium Planitia – a place where oddball alien hunters claim to have spotted a ‘crashed UFO’ and an ‘extraterrestrial city’.

Once settled, the solar-powered craft will spend one Martian year – two Earth years – plumbing the depths of the planet’s interior for clues to how Mars took form and, by extension, how the Earth and other rocky planets came into being.

While Earth’s tectonics and other forces have erased most evidence of its early history, much of Mars – about one-third the size of Earth – is believed to have remained relatively static for more than 3 billion years, creating a geologic time machine for scientists.

Scientists expect to detect up to 100 marsquakes over the course of the mission, producing data that will help them deduce the depth, density and composition of the planet’s core, the rocky mantle surrounding it and the outermost layer, the crust.

Nasa is planning to broadcast its first Mars landing in six years to viewers ‘everywhere’ using its social media accounts and online television channel.

Make sure you visit Metro.co.uk tonight to get all the news about this historic Mars landing.