NASA calls off planned March 2016 launch of Mars lander

All seemed fixed until Monday when testing in extreme cold temperatures (-49 degrees Fahrenheit/-45 degrees Celsius) found the instrument again failed to hold a vacuum.

“For InSight, that 2016 launch window existed from March 4 to March 30”, the space agency said.

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. “Our teams will find a solution to fix it, but it won t be solved in time for a launch in 2016”.

“Learning about the interior structure of Mars has been a high priority objective for planetary scientists since the Viking era”, says John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

Following the cancellation of the mission, the next launch opportunity of InSight will come in 2018.

The three seismometers in the instrument, sensitive enough to detect vibrations as slight as the width of an atom, require a near-perfect vacuum for precise measurements. But at least we’re not on our way to Mars and discovering a leak.

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

InSight is created to investigate the processes that formed and shaped Mars.

Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of the spacecraft, had already shipped InSight to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where it was to be launched on an Atlas 5 rocket. Detailed knowledge of the interior of Mars in comparison to Earth will help scientists understand better how terrestrial planets form and evolve, as well better prepare for the day astronauts are sent to live on the Red Planet. Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator, said that during tests of the instrument, still in France, air was pumped out to a pressure of about 1 ten-millionth of a millibar, or less than 1 billionth of the Earth’s atmospheric pressure of about 1,000 millibars.

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. “It’s just a hiccup on our path to getting this kind of science, this kind of understanding of our solar system and our place in the universe”.