NASA : TRIUMPHS AND TRUMPETS

NASA was counted down to nail-biting touchdown Monday of the $993 million Mars InSight, the first spacecraft to listen for quakes and study the inner workings of another rocky planet.

No one was on board the spacecraft, which launched nearly seven months ago and has traveled some 300 million miles [482 million kilometers].

But part of its mission is to inform efforts to one day send human explorers to the  Red Planet , which  NASA  hopes to do so by the 2030s.

The lander is the first to reach Mars since 2012  when NASA's Curiosity Rover touched down to scour the surface and analyse rocks for signs that life forms may once have inhabited Earth's neighbor, now a frigid and a dry planet.

InSight survived some tense entry in Mars atmosphere traveling at a speed of  12,300 miles [ 19,800 kilometers] per hour and swiftly slowing to just five mph [eight kph].

This entry, descent and landing phase began at  11: 47 am in California [1947 GMT]   and was only half jokingly refereed to at  NASA  as the  ''Six and a half minutes of Terror].

Of  43 missions launched towards Mars , only 18 have made it intact   -a success rate of around 40 percent. All those made it came from the United States.

''Going to Mars is really, really hard,'' said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for the NASA science mission directorate.

''The exciting part is that we are building on the success of the best team that has ever landed on this planet, which is NASA's team with its contractors and collaborators.''

The name  InSight is derived from  ''Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.'' [Agencies].