NASA Suspends March Insight Mission

This artist’s concept from August 2015 depicts NASA’s InSight Mars lander fully deployed for studying the deep interior of Mars.

InSight, NASA’s upcoming mission to measure the internal geophysical properties of Mars, will miss its launch window in 2016 due to a hardware problem in a science instrument provided by the French space agency.

Up until Monday, managers had high hopes they could fix all the leaks in time for next March’s liftoff atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

Grunsfeld said InSight’s science mission would have been ruined if SEIS had been sent in its current condition.

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.

Grunsfeld said that if the seismometers did not work, “in some sense, we don’t have a decision to make, because we’re not ready to go”.

The problem started with one of the most intriguing new instruments on InSight, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, and the difficulty of keeping it airtight.

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

SEIS requires a vacuum environment to make its ultraprecise measurements.

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.

CNES President Jean-Yves Le Gall said two weeks ago that he expected the issue would be rectified in time for SEIS’ shipment to the United States in early January. These were fixed, but yesterday during final thermal testing, “we found that it is still leaking”.

Thankfully, plans are still on track for the upcoming launch of the Mars 2020 rover, as well as the ESA’s 2016 and 2018 ExoMars missions to study Martian astrobiology (i.e. find out whether life once existed on Mars – or perhaps still does). “It’s a question of a few months”, Pircher said.

About $525 million of the mission’s $675 million budget has been spent.

2016’s opportunity extended from March 4 to March 30.

The first rover on Mars was Sojourner, carried by Mars Pathfinder, which landed on 27 September 1997.

InSight, whose name is short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, was created to help scientists better understand Mars’ interior structure – knowledge that, in turn, should shed light on the formation and evolution of rocky planets in general.