October 14, 2018

We will be landing in 42 days! That sounds like a reasonable starting place for a galactic hitchhiker’s countdown to begin.

I’m one of 2,429,807 people with boarding passes for Mars. Our essence, in the form of our names encoded on a chip attached to Insight, is scheduled to land at Elysium Planitia on Mars November 26, 2018. To celebrate the countdown I’m going to chat with a scientist about the peaks, plateaus, and pitfalls of space research.