Faulty tool halts Nasa Mars mission

Technical concerns aside, InSight could still be canceled for budgetary reasons – a possibility Grunsfeld would not rule out, because InSight is a cost-capped mission in NASA’s Discovery line of competitively selected missions.

The instruments aboard InSight – a shortening of Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport – are created to listen to what is going on in the deep interior of the planet.

The instrument involved is a French seismometer that is created to measure ground movements as small as the diameter of an atom.

A leak occurred earlier this year that had prevented the seismometer from retaining vacuum conditions. 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.

“I feel very bad for our partners in France who have worked so hard to get us to the point that we thought we would be able to make it to the 2016 launch”, Grunsfeld said. But at least we’re not on our way to Mars and discovering a leak.

The setback means that the team will not have the instruments ready in time for the scheduled launch of the spacecraft in March 2016.

The uncrewed Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1) is the next space flight of Orion that will be launched into a distant retrograde orbit around the moon in 2018. By the time engineers pulled the plug, the spacecraft had been moved to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and the Atlas V rocket that was going to send it into space was being assembled. Assuming the cause of the leak can be repaired, something both the teams at NASA and CNES feel is likely, the launch delay introduces a potential new problem: the budget. To date, InSight has already cost $525 million. It would have landed on Mars six months after launch.

Instead, it’s being sent back to its maker – Lockheed Martin – in Denver. There it wait for the next two years. Robotic spacecraft are leading the way for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program, with the upcoming Mars 2020 rover being designed and built, the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers exploring the Martian surface, the Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft now orbiting the planet, along with the MAVEN orbiter, which recently helped scientists understand what happened to the Martian atmosphere.

Bruce Banerdt, the InSight principal investigator, said that InSight’s investigation of the Mars planet’s interior will give a better understanding of how rocky planet like Mars and Earth were formed and evolved.