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NASA Suspends Next Mars Mission by at Least 2 Years
The mission will launch during the period March 4 to March 30, 2016, and land on Mars Sept. 28, 2016.
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During a test Monday at ultracold temperatures, about minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, a leak was again observed.
The spacecraft was to have launched from the Vandenberg launch site in California. Its findings will improve understanding about the evolution of the inner solar system’s rocky planets, including Earth.
InSight’s goal is to probe the structure of the Martian interior by listening to how marsquakes ring through the planet.
There’s not enough time to fix the leak before the March launch date – or any other date in all of 2016. That added hundreds of millions of dollars to the mission cost, boosting the total price tag to $2.5 billion.
NASA has taken the decision to cancel the mission after several failed attempts to fix the leak appeared in the French space agency CNES-built seismometer, Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS). But because InSight is a cost-capped mission, the team will have to assess the cost of fixing the lander and maintaining the mission for another two years and seek funding approval.
NASA’s next mission to Mars will be delayed at least two more years, if not indefinitely. The instrument, known as SEIS, was supposed to help InSight become what NASA was calling the “first project devoted to investigating the deep interior of the Red Planet”.
The faulty instrument is a very sensitive seismometer created to measure movements in the Martian soil as small as the diameter of an atom, NASA said in a statement.
NASA and CNES also are participating in the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Mars Express mission now operating at Mars and plans to participate on ESA’s 2016 and 2018 ExoMars missions, including providing telecommunication radios for ESA’s 2016 orbiter and a critical element of a key astrobiology instrument on the 2018 ExoMars rover.
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A United States technology satellite planned to start in March to Mars continues to be seated as a result of trickle in a vital study device, NASA stated on Thursday, making doubt concerning the widely-anticipated work review the inside of the planet’s potential. Bruce Banerdt, a geologist who has spent his life studying the evolution of Mars and who is the mission’s principal investigator, said he has been waiting a long time to answer these questions.