Leaky seismometer delays NASA’s next Mars mission

NASA on Tuesday said it has suspended its next mission to Mars by at least two years due to a leak in a highly sensitive instrument key to the operation.

Standing for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy and Heat Transport, InSight will be the first mission to Mars aimed at studying its deep interior. The lander would have made it to Mars, then drilled in the soil with a seismographic instrument to monitor movements underground.

The lander is created to examine the geology of Mars in depth. Two, to develop methods for growing potatoes here on Earth in very inhospitable conditions – if that particular magic formula can be cracked, it has the potential to save millions of lives on our own planet.

NASA said the decision to delay follows unsuccessful attempts to fix a leak affecting the device, which requires a vacuum seal around its three main sensors to withstand the harsh conditions of the Martian environment.

The offending instrument is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), provided by CNES, France’s space agency.

They kept patching the leaks, but a few days ago when they tested their fix in the ultracold conditions it would face on Mars (less than -45 degrees Celsius), it became clear that the leaks hadn’t been fixed-and that they simply wouldn’t be able to be fixed in time to meet the scheduled launch.

As testing of the SEIS instrument continues at the CNES facilities just outside Paris, the InSight spacecraft itself will be returned from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where it was soon to begin being prepared for launch, to Lockheed Martin in Denver, Colorado, where it was built. But, in response to questions about whether InSight was set to go up in the next one, which arrives in May of 2018, NASA wasn’t ready to confirm.

“The successes of that mission’s rover, Curiosity, have vastly outweighed any disappointment about that delay”.

Earlier in 2008, NASA had postponed Mars Science Laboratory Mission for two years.

A French-made seismographic instrument destined for Nasa’s InSight Mars mission lander (artist’s impression pictured) was found to have leaks in its vacuum container. InSight was planning to hit one of these orbital alignments in March 2016.

NASA, French seismometer manufacturer Centre National d’Études Spatiales, and spacecraft contractor Lockheed Martin will now spend the next four to six weeks reviewing data and determining how to proceed. The mission has a total cost cap of $675 million and it has already spent $525 million.

The goal of the mission was to explore the interior core, mantle and crust of Mars in a way that no other planet has been studied outside of Earth. For InSight, that 2016 launch window existed from March 4 to March 30.

Grunsfeld said InSight is a “stand-alone Discovery mission” that does not affect the tempo for sending other spacecraft to the Red Planet, leading up to potential human journeys to Mars and its moons in the 2030s.

The setback comes at a time when NASA is beginning to ramp up the exploration of Mars in anticipation for getting astronauts on the surface before 2040.