NASA hopes to land its first spacecraft on Mars since Curiosity six years ago on Monday afternoon, and an Alabama scientist on the mission team will hold her breath along with people around the world until the InSight lander comes down safely.

“We’ll know relatively quickly whether it survived and is doing OK,” Dr. Renee Weber said this month from her Huntsville office. “That’s when you’ll see everybody cheering and hugging.”

Mars InSight – the name stands for Mars Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport – should touch down around 2 p.m. CST. It will send a “ping” that says it’s alive and ready to begin two years of scientific study.

Landing on Mars isn’t easy. Only about 4 in 10 of all the missions sent to the planet have been successful, and America is the only nation to have a mission survive the landing. What makes Mars so tough? It starts with a thin atmosphere – 1 percent of Earth’s atmosphere – and that means almost no friction to slow a spacecraft.

NASA will cover the landing live on its website, social media platforms and NASA television. Live viewing events are scheduled around the country including the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville.

The landing target is the Elysium Planitia, which Weber said is the closest thing Mars has to “a parking lot – a very flat, safe space with no rocks and no slopes.” What it does have is abundant sunlight to fuel InSight’s solar panels.

Using a seismometer and heat flow probe, InSight will be the first spacecraft to probe beneath the Martian surface. The probe is designed “to measure the heat flux coming out of the planet,” Weber said. “That tells us about the deep structure and where the planet is in its evolutionary cycle.”

Scientists know Mars is further along in that cycle than Earth. “Planets start as hot, active, probably molten balls of rock that, as they evolve, lose their heat and contract, becoming less active,” Weber said.

Scientists believe Mars and Earth were formed from the same basic “primordial stuff” more than 4.5 billion years ago. But they evolved differently, and the question is why.

“Understanding the internal structure of (Mars) helps us figure out by extension how all terrestrial planets are formed and evolved,” Weber said. “It gives some context to some observations we have from Earth.”

Scientists know from photographs that Mars still has geological faults. It doesn’t have moving plates below the surface like Earth, but Weber said, “We’ve seen rockfalls and landslides that are probably induced by some kind of shaking.”

“Being able to show that those faults are still shaking today would be a really big deal,” Weber said.

Insight will also observe meteorite impacts. If the seismometer can record an impact, that data can be used to fine-tune models for locating other events on the planet.

One of the mission’s coolest features is that InSight’s data data will become accessible to the public after a period when only the science team can see it.

“The seismic data will actually be incorporated into the same software tools that terrestrial seismologists use to look at earthquake data,” Weber said. “Anybody that wants to will be able to go into IRIS (iris.edu) and request to download seismic data from Mars the same way you can request seismic data from Earth.”

The path that led Weber to the National Space Science Technology Center research center in Huntsville started with studying seismology in graduate school. She began ocean bottom seismology – used heavily by the oil exploration industry – then had a chance “to look at seismic information from the moon.

“I said, ‘Yes, I’m interested’” Weber said. “I didn’t know there were seismographs on the moon.” (There are thanks to NASA’s Apollo program.)

Weber did her first post-doctorate research with “with the team in France that actually built the seismometer for InSight, and that’s how I got involved.”

The team proposed the Mars mission in 2010 to NASA’s Discovery program. That program to develop smaller missions for NASA funding is managed at Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

“The team had been trying to get a seismometer on Mars for the previous two decades,” Weber said. “So this is really the culmination of an entire career’s worth of work from hundreds of people, probably thousands of people at this point, who have all advocated over their careers for seismic missions to other planets.”

Weber is a member of the science team that meets regularly during the mission’s opening weeks and months as decisions are made about what maneuvers the craft should execute next. After that, InSight will sit quietly for two years listening and sending data back to Earth. The

As cool as InSight is, it’s only one of several NASA probes reaching their destinations in deep space. They include:

- The Parker Solar Probe, which made its first close approach to the Sun Nov. 5 coming within 15 million miles of Earth’s star and reaching a top speed of 213,000 miles an hour.

- The probe OSIRIS-Rex is scheduled to arrive at the deep space asteroid Bennu Dec. 13 for a year of study capped by a tag-up to collect a sample and return it.

- New Horizons will make the most-distant spacecraft flyby to date Jan. 1 when it encounters the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultimata Thule.