NASA successfully landed a spacecraft on Mars Monday, but earthlings largely met the news with a collective shrug.

The era of automated space exploration does not capture the public’s attention as did those heady days of human space flight, when men made of “The Right Stuff” blasted through Earth’s atmosphere atop massive rockets while crammed into capsules the size of a compact car.

With the Apollo moon-landing program of the 1960s and early 1970s, NASA pushed technology past all prudent boundaries and largely got away with it. When a manned spacecraft landed on the moon in 1969, less than half of American households had color TVs, the first personal computer was still two decades away and slide rules were the common method of making advanced calculations.

The combination of danger, adventure, personalities and competition with the Soviet Union and the communist system captured the public’s attention in a way the space program has never achieved since, manned or unmanned. The Space Shuttle got serious attention only when things went terribly wrong.

And can you name the astronauts currently aboard the International Space Station? They are Commander Alexander Gerst of Germany, Sergey Prokopyev of Russia and Dr. Serena M. Auñón-Chancellor of the United States.

The successful landing of InSight near the equator of Mars should not, however, be taken for granted. Landing a spacecraft on Mars remains a big challenge. NASA has now been successful eight times, but more attempts by NASA and other world space agencies have failed.

To get to its landing place on the plain of Elysium Planitia, the spacecraft had to slice through the atmosphere of Mars at a precise angle — even a near miss would have led to it burning up during entry or deflecting off into space. Its pre-programmed commands had to take InSight from a speed of 12,500 mph as it approached the Red Planet down to 5 mph as its shock-absorbing landing gear settled on the surface.

Now, with painstaking deliberativeness, InSight will prepare to carry out its mission using seismometers, a heat probe and other instruments to monitor marsquakes and study the crust and deep interior of the planet. In the process, scientists expect to learn more about the forces that shaped the solar system’s rocky planets, including our own. But it could be two or three months before researchers back on Earth carefully deploy the instruments.

Not exciting enough? Perhaps. But darn impressive and likely to produce more science than the moon shots ever did.

The Day editorial board meets with political, business and community leaders to formulate editorial viewpoints. It is composed of President and Publisher Timothy Dwyer, Executive Editor Izaskun E. Larraneta, Owen Poole, copy editor, and Lisa McGinley, retired deputy managing editor. The board operates independently from The Day newsroom.