NASA suspends InSight mission to Mars

InSight was supposed to launch in March, but a series of leaks in a mission-critical instrument, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) provided by the French space agency, CNES, will keep the mission grounded well past a 26-day Mars launch window that opens March 4, Grunsfeld said.

The instruments have been created to measure movements as small as the diameter of an atom.

Unfortunately, a leak was discovered earlier this year that prevented the vacuum to seal, and while it was thought to have been repaired, the instrument again failed to hold a vacuum during a test on Monday, December 21. Banerdt said the instrument would still function if the pressure were 100 times higher, at 1 tenth of a millibar.

“We were very close to succeeding, but an anomaly has occurred, which requires further investigation”, Marc Pircher, the director of CNES at Toulouse Space Centre.

This is a precautionary measure. Mars watchers say the setback means the next possible launch might not be until 2018. The agency will review potential solutions to the instrumental problem, as well as run the costs of potentially delaying the mission for two years.

NASA and its partners will have to decide whether to pursue the mission after they discover the source of the new leak.

“We just don’t have enough time to find the leak, fix it and still make it to the launch pad in March”, John Grunsfeld, NASA associate administrator for science, said during a phone call with reporters. It would have been the first mission to the planet since the Curiosity rover landed in 2012.

Though clearly disappointed, NASA officials said scrapping the mission won’t affect any other Mars-related missions.

All of the activity is created to help NASA prepare for the ultimate mission: sending astronauts to the Red Planet two decades from now.

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.

Budgetary limits may factor into a pending decision on whether NASA will proceed with the program.