NASA's $830-million Mars mission is about to land. Here's a second-by-second timeline of the InSight probe's treacherous journey to the Martian surface.

• NASA's InSight robot will attempt a Mars landing around 3 p.m. ET on Monday, November 26.
• The $830-million mission must perfectly execute thousands of steps to not burn up, crash, or get tossed into deep space.
• NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory created a timeline of events to track the roughly 14-minute-long landing process.

If you aren't nervous for NASA's InSight Mars probe, you probably should be.

Getting a rocket ride to the red planet is the easy part. It's touching down on Mars that aerospace engineers consider to be one of the greatest challenges in the solar system; in fact, about a third of missions successfully launched to the red planet don't survive a landing.

"It takes thousands of steps to go from the top of the atmosphere to the surface, and each one of them has to work perfectly," Rob Manning, the chief engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a video.

Read more: Watch live video coverage of NASA's InSight probe landing on Mars

The 789-lb lander will officially begin its descent to Mars at 2:40 p.m. ET on Monday and touch down by 2:54 p.m. ET. After that, NASA hopes to use InSight to decode the internal structure of Mars, among other mysteries.

Here's a minute-by-minute look at the biggest moments of InSight's landing sequence — any of which could doom the robot.

SEE ALSO: 13 incredible facts you probably didn't know about Mars

DON'T MISS: NASA will dig for signs of alien life in Jezero Crater — the landing site for its Mars 2020 rover

2:40 p.m. ET: The InSight lander, tucked inside an entry capsule, separates from the spacecraft that carried the mission to Mars.

2:41 p.m. ET: The entry capsule turns to orient itself for atmospheric entry at just the right angle — about 12 degrees relative to the surface.

2:47 p.m. ET: The capsule begins to plow through the first layers of the Martian atmosphere at about 12,300 mph.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Contributer : Tech Insider https://ift.tt/2FBAUp6

Something that you might miss to see?