InSight landed on Mars and I stayed up to watch

It’s 2am and I’m crying because a robot landed on Mars.

I should go to sleep. I have work in six hours. Instead I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed with my laptop balanced on a pillow, watching the NASA live stream of the InSight landing, and there are actual tears on my face, which feels ridiculous and I don’t care.

The landing sequence took about seven minutes. They call it “seven minutes of terror,” which is dramatic but accurate. The lander hit the Martian atmosphere at 12,300 mph. It had to slow itself down to 5 mph using a heat shield, a parachute, and retro rockets, all autonomously, all without any help from Earth, because the signal delay is over eight minutes. By the time JPL received confirmation that InSight had entered the atmosphere, the landing had already happened. It was already over. It had either worked or it hadn’t.

It worked.

The control room at JPL erupted. People who had spent years of their lives working on this mission, people who understood the statistics (about 40% of Mars missions fail), jumped out of their chairs and hugged each other and some of them cried too.

Why I’m crying

I’ve been trying to figure this out. It’s not sadness. It’s not joy exactly. It’s something else.

I think it’s the audacity of it. The sheer, absurd audacity of sending a machine 300 million miles through empty space and landing it gently on the surface of another planet. We can barely agree on what to have for dinner, and we did this. Humans. The species that invented both penicillin and the atomic bomb. We built a robot, put it on a rocket, aimed it at a dot in the sky, and landed it in a specific patch of Martian dirt called Elysium Planitia.

InSight’s mission is to study the interior of Mars. It has a seismometer to listen for marsquakes and a probe designed to burrow five meters into the ground to measure heat flow. It’s going to tell us what Mars is made of, deep down.

But that’s the science. The thing that made me cry at 2am isn’t the science.

It’s that we keep doing this. We keep reaching. The universe is enormous and cold and indifferent, and we keep sending little pieces of ourselves into it, knowing they’ll never come back, knowing we’ll never touch them again. Viking in 1976. Pathfinder in 1997. Spirit and Opportunity in 2004. Curiosity in 2012. Now InSight.

Each one is a message. Not to aliens. To ourselves. We’re saying: we’re still here. We’re still curious. We haven’t given up.

Elysium Planitia

The landing site is called Elysium Planitia. In Greek mythology, the Elysian Fields were the final resting place of the heroic and the virtuous. A kind of paradise.

I don’t think NASA named it. I think the International Astronomical Union did, decades ago, following a convention. But still. A robot named InSight, sent to look inside a planet, landing in a place named for paradise.

Sometimes the poetry writes itself.

It’s 2:30 now. I really should sleep. The NASA stream is showing the first image from InSight’s camera. It’s blurry, covered in dust, and you can barely make out the Martian horizon through the lens cover.

It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen all year.

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