NASA delays the study of geology on Mars

The agency’s latest mission to Mars was meant to send off the InSight spacecraft, created to examine the Red Planet’s geology with instruments that could monitor seismic activity.

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

A leak earlier this year that previously had prevented the seismometer from retaining vacuum conditions was repaired, and the mission team was hopeful the most recent fix also would be successful. The fault discovered was a leak in the vacuum-sealed metal sphere that held three seismometers.

NASA’s newest Mars lander won’t launch in 2016. For InSight, that 2016 launch window existed from March 4 to March 30.

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. It will soon ship back to Denver, Colorado to wait for its next opportunity to launch. The next favorable alignment won’t occur until May 2018.

NASA has delayed the launch of its next Mars probe after repeated attempts to fix a leak on the device failed.

NASA managers said it could take several months of analysis and discussion before they decide how to proceed.

So far, the USA space agency has spent $525 million on the program, including buying an Atlas 5 rocket from United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin (LMT.N) and Boeing (BA.N). “But before we can even go through that discussion, we have to understand what the cost impacts are”. It would have landed on Mars six months after launch. There it wait for the next two years.

InSight is created to investigate the processes that formed and shaped Mars.

Mars will give a better understanding of Earth’s early development because the crust and the mantle of the red planet have been undisturbed as compared to Earth. Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator, said that during tests of the instrument, still in France, air was pumped out to a pressure of about 1 ten-millionth of a millibar, or less than 1 billionth of the Earth’s atmospheric pressure of about 1,000 millibars. “It is not a disaster”. “It’s not a disaster, it’s a minor hiccup on our path to getting this information on Mars and our place in the universe”.