The problematic instrument is a seismometer provided by France s Centre National d Etudes Spatiales (CNES), created to measure ground movements as small as the diameter of an atom.
Advertisement
Discussion of kashmir between India and Pakistan
Security forces and troops were beefed up at the Lahore International Airport shortly before Modi’s arrival. The previously unplanned visit is a sign of improving relations between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.
According to the United States space agency, a leak earlier this year that had prevented the seismometer from retaining vacuum conditions was repaired, but after the final sealing of the instrument, another leak was detected.
Manchester United captain Wayne Rooney dropped to bench for Stoke clash
Asked about his future, Van Gaal said: “The club doesn’t have to fire or sack me – sometimes I do it by myself”. We have to be strong and get through it and get the results we need”, he added.
NASA managers and French designers of the instrument said Tuesday they must now decide whether the pouch’s vacuum seal needs to be repaired, redesigned or the mission scrapped.
Tornado causes damage in Alabama
The Alabama tornado is the latest development in an ongoing series of storms that has hammered the South during Christmas week. Despite being newly homeless, Perkins said the tragedy helped her “stop and realize what Christmas is all about”.
During a test Monday at ultracold temperatures, about minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, a leak was again observed.
“The vacuum issue is the only thing that was standing between us and launch”, Bruce Banerdt, InSight’s principal investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told CNN.
The InSight mission is considered to be significant before NASA’s planned Mars exploration programme, which involves sending humans to the Red Planet.
“The whole project team has been giving it everything they’ve got for many months to try to make this launch opportunity, so we are understandably disappointed”.
John Grunsfeld, NASA’s science mission chief said that the launch date was very close, and it was not possible to fix the leak in time for the launch.
“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”, he said in a statement.
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.
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. With the 2016 launch cancelled, the spacecraft will be returned from Vandenberg to Lockheed’s facility in Denver. Scientists hoped observations made by Insight would provide new clues as to how Mars first formed.
NASA officials said the delay of the InSight mission wouldn’t affect the schedule of any other missions to Mars.
The Heat Flow and Physical Properties Package (HP3), another major instrument of InSight has been supplied by German Aerospace Center (DLR). The mission will launch during the period March 4 to March 30, 2016, and land on Mars Sept. 28, 2016.
Advertisement
The InSight stationary lander is based on NASA’s Phoenix lander, which set down at the Martian North Pole in 2008, and is designed for a 720-day primary mission near the Martian equator.
