NASA suspends 2016 launch of Mars lander

Then they found another leak, and another, and another. The mission was planned to launch in March 2016.

Grunsfeld said InSight’s science mission would have been ruined if SEIS had been sent in its current condition. “Sometimes things don’t work out”.

The SEIS instrument was supplied by the French space agency (CNES), and its president, Jean-Yves Le Gall, argued that the leak could be fixed in time. The mission costs a total of $675 million, and some $525 million have been spent till now.

Budgetary limits may factor into a pending decision on whether NASA will proceed with the program. The launch delay will automatically trigger an assessment of whether the mission should fly at all. And the fixes indeed appeared to be working until Monday (Dec. 21), when a leak reappeared during testing at a facility in France, Grunsfeld said.

The troubled seismometer, which detects minute vibrations, features sensors encased in a nine-inch (23-cm) wide vacuum sphere, which has been plagued by a series of leaks since August.

The instrument involved is a French seismometer that is created to measure ground movements as small as the diameter of an atom. “We will do that in a few months”.

NASA will try to resolve the issue and give its Insight Mars lander another shot to go to the red planet. The heat flow instrument is functioning flawlessly.

“We know the interior of Earth and its structure very well, but of the other planets, Mars is our only hope to make those kinds of measurements”, said Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. “Having an unscheduled hold will suck up money, but exactly what that means is all speculation at this point”, says Barbara Cohen, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

NASA and CNES also are participating in the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Mars Express mission now operating at Mars and plans to participate on ESA’s 2016 and 2018 ExoMars missions, including providing telecommunication radios for ESA’s 2016 orbiter and a critical element of a key astrobiology instrument on the 2018 ExoMars rover.

Just days before Christmas the realization that the InSight probe must be delayed, or potentially even canceled, clearly disappointed everyone involved in the mission, who had believed up until the last 24 hours that they were clear for launch.