Insight was expected to arrive at Mars in September to take measurements of the red planet’s interior and its atmosphere, and to take color images. The agency announced this week its InSight spacecraft, which had a planned March 2016 launch to Mars, has been suspended indefinitely due to a leak in a section of the prime instrument in the science payload.
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The next opportunity to launch the InSight lander is in May 2018 since the best chances of launching missions between Earth and Mars occur for just a few weeks every 26 months.
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“Learning about the interior structure of Mars has been a high priority objective for planetary scientists since the Viking era”, John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, said in a press release.
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NASA has examined the surface of Mars with rovers and satellites, but gaining a fuller understanding of the planet requires looking beneath the surface. Its designers have battled leaks for the last two years – patch one, find another, patch that one, find another. 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. He added that a decision on a path forward will be made in the coming months. But officials said their determination to explore Mars has not waned and they still have a list of missions planned with the eventual goal of landing astronauts on the planet. NASA said the decision to delay follows unsuccessful attempts to fix a leak affecting the vacuum seal around three main sensors that is necessary in order to withstand the harsh conditions of the Martian environment.
The instrument causing the trouble is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS), a seismometer built by France’s Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES).
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Marc Pircher, director of CNES’s Toulouse Space Centre, stated that there is not enough time to fix another leak in time for a launch in 2016. The 2016 launch window closes March 30, NASA said. The InSight spacecraft, which was built by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, now must be returned to Denver until next year. “We do not believe that this is a fundamentally hard problem, given enough time to systematically investigate and resolve it. The French space agency estimates that a handful of months should suffice, although we will probably take a little longer to make sure there aren’t any further subtle problems hiding in the wings”.
