NASA’s InSight Mars mission will be delayed

The space agency announced today that the launch of the Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight) lander mission scheduled for next March has been scrubbed due to a persistent vacuum leak in the lander’s primary science instrument.

“InSight’s investigation of the Red Planet’s interior is created to increase understanding of how all rocky planets, including Earth, formed and evolved”, said Bruce Banerdt, InSight Principal Investigator at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California. The agency said one of the key instruments of the spacecraft can’t be fixed in time for liftoff.

A United States technology satellite planned to start in March to Mars continues to be seated as a result of trickle in a vital study device, NASA stated on Thursday, making doubt concerning the widely-anticipated work review the inside of the planet’s potential.

NASA has called off the mission because there is little time to fix the leak in the seal of this vital instrument. The mission will launch during the period March 4 to March 30, 2016, and land on Mars Sept. 28, 2016.

“A decision on a path forward will be made in the coming months, but one thing is clear: NASA remains fully committed to the scientific discovery and exploration of Mars”, added Grunsfeld. This means that InSight will be returned from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to the Lockheed facility in Denver while scientists revisit their calculations for the next opportunity.

In 2012 NASA chose InSight over other proposed missions to sail a boat on the seas of Saturn’s moon Titan and to hop across the surface of a comet.

Over the next couple of months, NASA will assess options for repairing the faulty instrument, a sensitive seismometer that was provided by the French space agency, CNES.

“I feel bad for our partners in France, who have worked so hard to get us to the point where we thought we’d be able to make the 2016 launch”, Grunsfeld said. It would have been the first mission to the planet since the Curiosity rover landed in 2012.

Plans to send a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s remain “on track”, NASA said.

The sensor has been developed to measure ground movement as little as the diameter of an atom. The space agency just last week opened the astronaut application process for the class of 2017, which indicates a certain urgency. The robotic-lander could help scientists determine why the Red Planet’s core is so different than our planet.