NASA Suspends March Insight Mission

But the instrument’s sensors must operate in a vacuum with a pressure of no more than 1 microbar, and the vacuum seal failed during testing. The ideal 2016 launch window is between March 4 and 30th.

The problem has delayed and could possibly cancel the mission of one spacecraft to Mars, but what does it do to progress on NASA’s overall Mars goals?

The sensor has been developed to measure ground movement as little as the diameter of an atom.

InSight is a new Mars lander that would use a probe to explore the interior of Mars and measure the seismic activity of the planet. “A decision on a path forward will be made in the coming months”, said Grunsfeld in a prepared statement.

Unlike missions to Earth orbit, which have launch windows that can recur every day, and ones to the Moon that can recur monthly, planetary missions involve a complex ballet of two bodies revolving about the Sun. Each time they thought they had sealed the last leak, another one appeared.

Marc Pircher, director of CNES’s Toulouse Space Centre, said the recent anomaly requires further investigation.

The cancellation raises questions about the future of the research effort, as it will be another 26 months before Earth and Mars are favorably aligned for a launch.

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

According to the USA space agency, a leak earlier this year that had prevented the seismometer from retaining vacuum conditions was repaired, but after the final sealing of the instrument, another leak was detected.

Grunsfeld said that if the seismometers did not work, “in some sense, we don’t have a decision to make, because we’re not ready to go”. 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.

]Bruce Banerdt, the InSight principal investigator, said that InSight’s investigation of the Mars planet’s interior will give a better understanding of how rocky planets like Mars and Earth were formed and evolved.

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).

A United States technology satellite planned to start in March to Mars continues to be seated as a result of trickle in a vital study device, NASA stated on Thursday, making doubt concerning the widely-anticipated work review the inside of the planet’s potential.

The upcoming Mars 2020 rover was unaffected by the InSight setback.