NASA Delays Mars Mission Over Instrument Leak

The seismometer measures movements in the ground, some as small as the diameter of an atom, according to NASA.

Earlier in the year, a leak was found and resolved. However, while recently conducting a test in acute cold temperature of -45 degrees Celsius, the device again experienced failure.

The US space agency NASA has cancelled the planned launch of a Mars lander in March 2016.

The fact that the excellent chance of launching mission to Mars happens for a few week in every 26 months means that the task is delayed until March 2018. It could take a couple months to reach that decision point, NASA science chief John Grunsfeld said during a teleconference [Tuesday].

“We push the boundaries of space technology with our missions to enable science, but space exploration is unforgiving, and the bottom line is that we’re not ready to launch in the 2016 window”. The lander had already reached the launch site at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California when a key instrument developed a leak during a final round of thermal testing.

Technicians examine the solar-cell arrays on NASA’s InSight spacecraft inside a clean room at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver.

The Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3), another major instrument of InSight has been supplied by German Aerospace Center (DLR).

The costs for the InSight mission, including launch and data analysis, are capped at $675 million, up from an initial $425 million, NASA Planetary Sciences Division Director Jim Green told reporters. RISE, short for Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment, uses the lander’s X-band radio to measure the planet’s spin rate (and any variations in it) very precisely, which will provide additional clues to understanding the Martian interior.

NASA has plans to send human beings to Mars.

The InSight mission is considered to be significant before NASA’s planned Mars exploration programme, which involves sending humans to the Red Planet.

“Although I have personally been working toward making these measurements on Mars for 25 years, the actual InSight Mission Project has only been underway since about 2009”, he said.

This video includes images from NASA.

It’s not clear when the mission will be rescheduled, but it is not expected to launch until 2017 at the earliest.