Officials at the space agency announced Tuesday that its Mars InSight mission will miss its March 2016 launch date, because of stubborn tiny leaks in a vacuum sphere housing its seismic instrument.
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“Learning about the interior structure of Mars has been a high priority objective for planetary scientists since the Viking era”, Grunsfeld said.
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Within the next month or two, it may evaluate choices for fixing a seismometer which was supplied by the German area organization, the defective device, CNES.
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CNES, the French space agency, is in charge of InSight’s seismic instrument, which is to be placed on the surface to measure the vibrations of marsquakes and the impacts of meteorites.
“We’re looking at some time in the May 2018 timeframe”, John Gunsfeld, NASA associate administrator for science, said during a December 22 conference call.
The relative positions of the planets are most favorable for launching missions from Earth to Mars for only a few weeks every 26 months, according to NASA s statement. “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”. The problem is with a protective pouch around the lander’s seismometer, which was created to measure ground movement on the red planet.
“This was going to be our first mission to explore the interior of Mars using the same techniques we used to explore the interior of Earth”, said Grunsfeld. Its designers have battled leaks for the last two years – patch one, find another, patch that one, find another.
The instrument vacuum sealed to withstand the harsh conditions on the red planet. It has been experiencing multiple leaks, and most recently failed during a vacuum test on Monday in extreme cold temperatures.
The goal of the mission was to explore the interior core, mantle and crust of Mars in a way that no other planet has been studied outside of Earth.
Plans to send a manned mission to Mars in the 2030s remain “on track”, NASA said. “It is not to be, but at least we are not on our way to Mars and discovering the leak”. Though not irreparable, NASA says that there isn’t time to fix the SEIS and make the launch deadline.
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As testing of the SEIS instrument continues at the CNES facilities just outside Paris, the InSight spacecraft itself will be returned from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where it was soon to begin being prepared for launch, to Lockheed Martin in Denver, Colorado, where it was built.
