NASA has put its next Mars mission on hold indefinitely because of a leaky instrument.
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NASA’s next mission to Mars has been delayed until at least 2018 by a broken vacuum seal on the spacecraft, and the problem could threaten the whole mission.
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Marc Pircher, Director of CNES’s Toulouse Space Centre said, “It’s the first time ever that such a sensitive instrument has been built”.
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The space agency planned to launch a new Mars lander called Insight in March from Vandenberg Air Force Base, CA.
Cost will also impact the decision of whether the spacecraft launches. But the instrument’s sensors must operate in a vacuum with a pressure of no more than 1 microbar, and the vacuum seal failed during testing. “Our teams will find a solution to fix it, but it won’t be solved in time for a launch in 2016”.
After landing on Mars, InSight was created to detect quakes and other seismic activities, as well as measure how much heat is being released from the planets subsurface and monitor Mars’ wobble – or variations in its orbit – as it circles the sun.
With the spacecraft already being prepped for launch, mission managers decided that there wasn’t enough time to make the needed repairs. “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”.
InSight is created to investigate the processes that formed and shaped Mars. “Learning about the interior structure of Mars has been a high priority objective for planetary scientists since the Viking era”, said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington in a statement.
The two instruments to be placed into a work area in front of the lander are a seismometer to measure the microscopic ground motions from distant marsquakes providing information about the interior structure of Mars, and a heat-flow probe.
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Since the opportunities to send spacecraft to Mars occur during favorable orbital geometries that occur every 26 months, InSight won’t get another chance to leave Earth until 2018. The mission costs a total of $675 million, and some $525 million have been spent till now.
