NASA Delays Mars Mission Over Instrument Leak

The problematic instrument is a seismometer provided by France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), created to measure ground movements as small as the diameter of an atom.

NASA said a decision on how to proceed with the mission will be made in the coming months.

The Red Planet and Earth align favorably only once in every 26 months, due to which now, NASA’s InSight Mars lander has to wait until mid-2018 to start its mission to characterize interior of Mars in unmatched detail, in case the spacecraft gets off the ground at all.

Technicians examine the solar-cell arrays on NASA’s InSight spacecraft inside a clean room at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver. “Gaining information about the core, mantle and crust of Mars is a high priority for planetary science, and InSight was built to accomplish this”.

“We push the boundaries of space technology with our missions to enable science, but space exploration is unforgiving, and the bottom line is that we’re not ready to launch in the 2016 window”, John Grunsfeld of NASA said in a statement.

NASA’s next mission to Mars has been delayed until at least 2018 by a broken vacuum seal on the spacecraft, and the problem could threaten the whole mission. The mission would have been helpful in finding how the rocky planet formed and evolved. The lander had already reached the launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California when a key instrument developed a leak during a final round of thermal testing. The next opportunity to potentially launch InSight would be in May 2016, Agence France Presse reported.

Image: This artist’s concept from August 2015 depicts NASA’s InSight Mars lander fully deployed for studying the deep interior of Mars. “The successes of that mission’s rover, Curiosity, have vastly outweighed any disappointment about that delay”. The InSight investigation of Mars would include seismology, temperature measurements and precision tracking of the planet’s geophysical movements.

While the InSight mission is important, Grunsfeld said the suspension “doesn’t affect the sequence of any other missions” or NASA’s commitment to exploring the Red Planet.

However, the space agency’s plans hit a speed bump yesterday when officials announced that the next spacecraft in queue, InSight (short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport), would not be launched toward Mars early next year as planned.

The Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3), another major instrument of InSight has been supplied by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter continues the scientific studies underway since its arrival 12 years ago.

Budgetary limits may factor into a pending decision on whether NASA will proceed with the program.