Nasa’s InSight lands on Mars ‘with 1 lakh Indians’

MUMBAI: Around 1.30am on Tuesday, 1,38,899 Indians ‘landed’ on the flat Elsium Planitia region of Mars after travelling for six months in Nasa’s InSight ( Interior Exploration Using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) mission.

Don’t get it wrong. It was not a manned mission. The names of these space-crazy Indians had been etched on a silicon wafer microchip using an electron beam to form letters with lines one-one thousandth the diameter of a human hair. This tiny chip was attached to the top hull of the lander.

The over one lakh Indians who had responded to a call from Nasa to participate in the flight were provided online boarding passes by the space agency.

Some people posted an image of their boarding card on Facebook.


Details provided by Nasa showed that the total number of names received from all over the world was 2,42,9807. India ranks third in the global list, the first being the US with 6,76,773 names, followed by China with 2,62,752 names.

On Tuesday, when InSight executed a soft touchdown on the surface of the Red Planet after slamming the Martian atmosphere at a whopping 12,300 mph and slowing down to five mph in just six-and-a-half minutes, India had one more reason to celebrate: for the post-landing operations, one of the key figures is an Indian — Ravi Prakash, a systems engineer with Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

In an interview to TOI , he said: “InSight will be the first mission to use a robotic arm to place instruments on the surface of Mars. We feel confident we can place these instruments on Mars ,” he said