NASA Suspends Next Mars Mission by at Least 2 Years

A USA science satellite slated to launch to Mars in March has been grounded due to a leak in a key research instrument, NASA said on Tuesday, creating uncertainty about the future of a widely anticipated effort to study the interior of the planet.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency is planning its own March launch to Mars, a Trace Gas Orbiter. According to NASA, the geophysical instruments onboard InSight would be able to take readings of the planet’s interior to reveal clues about how terrestrial planets form.

The instrument causing the trouble is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), a seismometer built by France’s Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES). The delicate seismometer, which can measure ground movements as small as the diameter of an atom, appears to be functional and problem-free.

Later this year two new orbiting spacecraft will arrive at Mars, India’s Mangalyaan (their first mission to Mars) and Nasa’s Maven.

Scientists thought they had repaired the leak around the seal, but a test on Monday showed that the instrument could not hold its vacuum seal in extreme cold temperatures.

Engineers first discovered the leaks in August. “We either decide to go forward or we don’t, said a NASA spokesperson during the conference, “and a lot of that that depends on cost data”.

“We know the interior of Earth and its structure very well, but of the other planets, Mars is our only hope to make those kinds of measurements”, said Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division.

NASA’s newest Mars lander won’t launch in 2016.

The next opportunity for the mission to launch would be in the May 2018 timeframe.

The spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin, was delivered to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, on December 16. “The leak made the decision for us”, he said. The next favorable alignment won’t occur until May 2018. If the cost of storing and maintaining InSight are too high, it is possible that the mission blow through its budget and be cancelled. So far, $525 million of that sum has been spent, he added. The vacuum sphere technology should be more straightforward to fix, Pircher said. ESA will launch to Mars in March with its Trace Gas Orbiter. There it wait for the next two years.

“The vacuum issue is the only thing that was standing between us and launch”, Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told CNN. The Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft now orbit the planet, as does the MAVEN orbiter, which recently helped scientists understand what happened to the Martian atmosphere. I see this as a minor setback rather than a disaster.