Equipment failure pushes back Mars lander mission

NASA has been forced to suspend the 2016 launch of its InSight Mars lander because of a leak in one of the on-board instruments.

The fact that the excellent chance of launching mission to Mars happens for a few week in every 26 months means that the task is delayed until March 2018.

Perception came a week ago in Florida at Vandenberg Air Force Base to start products in front of a launch.

NASA California Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s (JPL) InSight principal investigator Bruce Banerdt said: “InSight’s investigation of the Red Planet’s interior is created to increase understanding of how all rocky planets, including Earth, formed and evolved”. The leak, initially discovered at the beginning of December, have proven surprisingly stubborn, and now, John M. Grunsfeld, the associate administrator for NASA’s science directorate says, “we just have run out of time”.

The inSight mission was for studying the interior structure of Mars. 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. No planet besides Earth has yet been studied in this way, but the pouch that protects the spacecraft’s seismometer, which measures ground movement, is not holding a vacuum, according to NASA.

InSight is made up of a lander that carries a robotic arm, two cameras, and a thermal probe that will dig into the Martian surface to calculate the planet’s temperature. Built by Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) in Toulouse, France, SEIS had developed a leak earlier this year, but engineers repaired it and believed they had fixed the problem. The mission’s estimated total cost (including development, launch, and operations) is $675 million, 85% of which has already been spent.

It may sound like fiction – and it’s possible the attempt to establish an outpost on Mars may be canceled – but in the meanwhile NASA is still planning for it and sharing its concepts for what the exploration may look like as technology develops.

The upcoming Mars 2020 rover was unaffected by the InSight setback. And preparations continue for the March 14th departure of another Mars-bound mission.