Engineers work on the InSight Mars lander. Photo by NASA
WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 (UPI) -- NASA's newest Mars lander won't launch in 2016. The space agency was forced to postpone the Insight mission indefinitely after leaks were discovered in one of the lander's instruments.
Engineers won't be able to fix the problem in time for the lander's scheduled March 2016 blast-off. A Mars-Earth alignment favorable to space travel happens just once every 26 months. That means InSight won't get another shot until 2018. And even then, it's not clear if the issue will be resolved.
"That's all forward work," John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, told reporters, referring to the future of the Insight mission. "We just haven't had time to work through that because our focus was on getting ready to launch."
The Insight lander is outfitted with instruments designed to study Mars' innards, including an advanced super-sensitive seismometer and a heat-flow probe. Scientists hoped observations made by Insight would provide new clues as to how Mars first formed.
"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.
But the lander's most important instrument, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure, isn't ready to handle the frigid cold of life on Mars. Its designers have battled leaks for the last two years -- patch one, find another, patch that one, find another.
Recently, it became clear their fixes weren't going to be enough, as new leaks continued to be discovered.
Though some have suggested the mission and lander might have to be scrapped, scientists on the project don't believe that will be the case.
"I see this as a minor setback," principle investigator Bruce Banerdt told Gizmodo. "It's not a disaster, it's a minor hiccup on our path to getting this information on Mars and our place in the universe."
