NASA calls off InSight mission to Mars

Grunsfeld said a decision on a path forward for the interior exploration using seismic investigations geodesy and heat transport (InSight) mission will be made “in the coming months”.

NASA officials determined there is insufficient time to resolve another leak, and complete the work and thorough testing required to ensure a successful mission.

Scientists hope that an in-depth geophysical survey of Mars will further understanding of how all terrestrial planets, including Earth, form and evolve.

The National Aeronautics and Science Administration (NASA) has called off its next Mars mission because of a leak in a science instrument.

The goal of the mission is to study the core, mantle and crust of Mars much akin to the study of Earth’s core, mantle and crust.

InSight was originally supposed to launch in March of 2016 for a six-month voyage to the Red Planet followed by a two-year study of Mars.

Marc Pircher, Director of CNES’s Toulouse Space Centre said, “It’s the first time ever that such a sensitive instrument has been built”.

Even if the leak is fixed in a few months, InSight can’t be launched anytime soon.

The next launch window will not occur until around May 2018 and the United States space agency said it does not yet know if it will be able to continue with the mission given budget constraints. This means that InSight will be returned from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to the Lockheed facility in Denver while scientists revisit their calculations for the next opportunity. NASA has plans to send human beings to Mars. NASA announced Tuesday that the spacecraft’s scheduled launch would be delayed.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether NASA had canceled the mission entirely or would delay it until 2018.

NASA’s twin Viking landers, launched in 1976, also carried seismometers, but they were located on top of the lander decks where they collected background noise and detected wind direction more than anything else, Science reported.

InSight’s science payload includes two key instruments: SEIS, provided by CNES, and the Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3), provided by the German Aerospace Center (DLR).

NASA will hold a media teleconference at 3:30 p.m. EST today to provide details on the agency’s decision.