8 tense minutes, and then good news, for UBC planetary scientist involved in Mars landing

For eight minutes on Monday afternoon, a crowd in a museum gallery at the University of British Columbia watched in rapt silence as a livestream broadcast a NASA spacecraft descending into Mars.

The stakes were especially high for one of the viewers: Catherine Johnson, a UBC planetary scientist who is the only Canadian involved in the mission.

"Eight minutes of nail biting and then happily good news," she said Monday on CBC's On The Coast, just a few hours after the three-legged InSight lander touched down on the red planet.

The spacecraft, designed to burrow beneath the surface of Mars, landed Monday after a six-month, 482-million-kilometre journey and a perilous, six-minute descent through the rose-hued atmosphere.

Flight controllers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. leapt out of their seats and erupted in screams, applause and laughter as news came in that the three-legged InSight lander had touched down on the red planet.

"Flawless," declared JPL's chief engineer, Rob Manning. "This is what we really hoped and imagined in our mind's eye," he said. "Sometimes things work out in your favour."

Travelling to the NASA lab

In Vancouver, the landing capped off five years of preparation for Johnson and her team. But their work has only just started. 

Johnson's team is studying marsquakes, including where they happen, to figure out active faults. It's also looking at the water content of rocks to shed light on the history of water on the planet.

Johnson is travelling Wednesday to NASA's jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The plan is to turn on a magnetometer Thursday to measure the planet's magnetic field, Johnson said. She'll use that data to better understand the properties of the planet's atmosphere.

"I'm excited about getting a good view of the interior," she said. "To learn about where and when quakes occur, how big they are, how many there are and where they are."

She added: "It's a big, big mission for the planetary science community."

Listen to the full interview with Johnson below:

'What a relief'

Across North America, live viewings were held at museums, planetariums and libraries, as well as Times Square in New York.

A pair of mini satellites trailing InSight since their May liftoff provided practically real-time updates of the spacecraft's supersonic descent through the reddish skies. The satellite also shot back a quick photo from Mars's surface.

The image was marred by specks of debris on the camera cover. But that quick look at the vista showed a flat, sandy surface with few if any rocks — just what scientists were hoping for. Much better pictures will arrive in the hours and days ahead.

"What a relief," Manning said. "This is really fantastic." He added: "This never gets old."

The InSight spacecraft reached the surface after going from 19,800 km/h to zero in six minutes flat, using a parachute and braking engines to slow down. Radio signals confirming the landing took more than eight minutes to cross the nearly 160 million kilometres between Mars and Earth.

It was NASA's ninth attempt to land at Mars since the 1976 Viking probes. All but one of the previous U.S. touchdowns were successful.

NASA last landed on Mars in 2012 with the Curiosity rover.

"Landing on Mars is one of the hardest single jobs that people have to do in planetary exploration," said InSight's lead scientist, Bruce Banerdt. "It's such a difficult thing. It's such a dangerous thing that there's always a fairly uncomfortably large chance that something could go wrong."

40 per cent success rate for Mars missions

Mars has been the graveyard for a multitude of space missions. Up to now, the success rate at the red planet has been only 40 per cent, counting every attempted flyby, orbital flight and landing by the U.S., Russia and other countries since 1960.

The U.S., however, has pulled off seven successful Mars landings in the past four decades, not counting InSight, with only one failed touchdown.

No other country has managed to set and operate a spacecraft on the dusty red surface.

InSight was shooting for Elysium Planitia, a plain near the Martian equator that the InSight team hopes is as flat as a parking lot in Kansas with few, if any, rocks.

This is no rock-collecting expedition. Instead, the stationary 360-kilogram lander will use its 1.8-metre robotic arm to place a mechanical mole and seismometer on the ground. 

The self-hammering mole will burrow five metres down to measure the planet's internal heat, while the seismometer listens for possible quakes.

But just getting those instruments in place will take several months, as NASA scientists will first need to assess the health of the spacecraft and the area where it landed. 

No life-detecting capability

Nothing like this has been attempted before on Mars, a planet nearly 160 million kilometres from Earth.

No lander has dug deeper than several inches, and no seismometer has ever worked on Mars.

By examining the interior of Mars, scientists hope to understand how our solar system's rocky planets formed 4.5 billion years ago and why they turned out so different — Mars, cold and dry, Venus and Mercury, burning hot and Earth, hospitable to life.

"We're trying to go back in time to the earliest stages of out planet," Banerdt said. "The fingerprints of those early processes just aren't here on the Earth."

InSight has no life-detecting capability, however. That will be left to future rovers. NASA's Mars 2020 mission, for instance, will collect rocks that will eventually be brought back to Earth and analyzed for evidence of ancient life.