Faulty tool halts Nasa Mars mission

In what could be described as a big impediment to future Mars exploration, NASA its suspending its intended March 2016 launch of the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission to Mars.

“Learning about the interior structure of Mars has been a high priority objective for planetary scientists since the Viking era”, said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington in a statement.

The agency’s latest mission to Mars was meant to send off the InSight spacecraft, created to examine the Red Planet’s geology with instruments that could monitor seismic activity.

The next time the earth and Mars are favourably aligned for a launch will be in 2018. Grunsfeld said it would take about two months to review the ramifications of the delay and the options of what to do next.

As part of NASA’s Discovery program, the InSight mission is cost-capped at $675 million, which includes all phases, from development to launch to post-landing data analysis.

The French space agency CNES, which provided the seismometer, attempted to fix a leak in the instrument’s vacuum canister, but apparently was unsuccessful.

The instruments have been created to measure movements as small as the diameter of an atom.

The struggling seismometer, which registers second vibrations, functions devices surrounded in an inch (23-cm) bread machine world, that has been affected by a number of leaks since September.

“InSight’s investigation of the Red Planet’s interior is created to increase understanding of how all rocky planets, including Earth, formed and evolved”, said Bruce Banerdt, InSight Principal Investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California.

Over the course of the mission, the vacuum would gradually rise by a factor of 10,000, to about 1 thousandth of a millibar, because of gases released within the instrument.

“The “Journey to Mars” exhibit will be highly interactive and allow visitors to enter a Mars portal to discover technologies that will allow us to go further than we ever have before”, said Richard Allen, President and CEO of Space Center Houston, during a presentation on December 16. Its designers have battled leaks for the last two years – patch one, find another, patch that one, find another. For InSight, that 2016 launch window existed from March 4 to March 30. It will be sent back to Lockheed Martin’s plant in Denver.