NASA cancels launch of next Mars probe due to instrument leak

The problematic instrument is a seismometer provided by France’s Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), created to measure ground movements as small as the diameter of an atom. However, during testing on Monday in extreme cold temperature the instrument again failed to hold a vacuum.

A look at NASA’s Mars exploration timeline before the latest announcement on the deferment of a mission set for next year.

The postponement is a big blow for the future of NASA’s research mission because launching missions between Earth and Mars occur for merely a few weeks in every 26 weeks. “We either decide to go forward, or we don’t, and that depends on cost data”, John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, told reporters.

Maryland-based American global aerospace, defense, security and advanced technologies company, Lockheed Martin, delivered the spacecraft to Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on December 16th.

Nasa’s Mars programme has suffered a setback following the decision of the space agency to suspend the March 2016 launch of the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) mission as a result of unsuccessful attempts to fix a leak in a section of the prime instrument in the science payload. “It’s the first time ever that such a sensitive instrument has been built”, said Marc Pircher, Director of CNES’s Toulouse Space Centre. That’s the goal of the InSight mission, which was supposed to launch next year.

An artist’s impression of the InSight Mars lander fully deployed for studying the deep interior of Mars.

NASA has already dropped $525 million of the $675 million allocated for the InSight mission, so putting the project on ice for two years could easily put it over budget.

Now that the 2016 launch has been cancelled, the spacecraft will bo back to Lockheed’s facility in Denver, Colorado. Still, Jim Green said that the successes of Curiosity have vastly outweighed any disappointment about that delay. However, NASA also stated that this will not affect any other of their plans regarding Mars.

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

According to the MyTechBits News, NASA has called off its next Mars mission because of a leak in a science instrument. CNES and DLR were mainly responsible for equipping in research instruments Mars probe lander. “We do not believe that this is a fundamentally hard problem, given enough time to systematically investigate and resolve it. The French space agency estimates that a handful of months should suffice, although we will probably take a little longer to make sure there aren’t any further subtle problems hiding in the wings”.