Spacecraft set for Mars landing tomorrow

TAMPA, Nov 24 (AFP): A spacecraft that cost nearly a billion dollars is on course to make a perilous landing on Monday on Mars, if it can survive a high-speed approach and the scorching heat of entering the Red Planet's atmosphere, a process NASA has nicknamed "six and a half minutes of terror."

"There is very little room for things to go wrong," said Rob Grover, head of the entry, descent and landing team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

If successful, the entry, descent and landing of the Mars InSight - designed to be the first mission to listen to the interior of another planet and reveal how rocky planets formed - will add another success to NASA's record when it comes to sending spacecraft to Mars.

So far the United States is the only nation to have made it there, and only NASA's unmanned Curiosity robotic rover is still tooling around on the surface.

But if it fails, it certainly won't be the first.

Of 43 other international attempts to send orbiters, probes, landers or rovers to Mars, 25 have not made it. Either they crashed into the surface, missed their planned orbit, or disappeared after launch.