NASA suspends next Mars rover mission

NASA has put its next Mars mission on hold indefinitely because of a leaky instrument.

InSight arrived last week at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to begin preparations ahead of a launch targeted for March 18. RISE, short for Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment, uses the lander’s X-band radio to measure the planet’s spin rate (and any variations in it) very precisely, which will provide additional clues to understanding the Martian interior.

NASA’s planetary missions have been on a roll of late, led by the mini-armada of Curiosity, Opportunity, Mars Odyssey, and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – all of which continue their scrutiny of the Red Planet.

Data collected by the spacecraft could lead to new insights regarding rocky planet formation and the internal structure of Mars.

“It’s the first time ever that such a sensitive instrument has been built”, Marc Pircher, director of the French space agency that provided the seismometer, said in a NASA release. The probe was to be one of the scientific tools that researchers would use to determine why Mars evolved so differently than Earth.

Within the next month or two, it may evaluate choices for fixing a seismometer which was supplied by the German area organization, the defective device, CNES.

The sensor has been developed to measure ground movement as little as the diameter of an atom. The seismometer provided by France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales required a vacuum seal around at its three main sensors to withstand the harsh conditions on the Mars.

Earlier in the year, a leak was found and resolved.

With the spacecraft already being prepped for launch, mission managers decided that there wasn’t enough time to make the needed repairs. Future missions to Mars – including a manned launch to the Red Planet in the 2030s and the European Space Agency’s upcoming ExoMars orbiter in 2016 and rover in 2018 – are on schedule, according to NASA.

NASA insists the delayed launch of the InSight does not jeopardize NASA’s overall goal of reaching Mars, although Mars enthusiasts are taking the news rather hard.