After Equipment Woes, NASA Mission To Mars Is Rescheduled For 2018

Mar 10, 2016, 02:10

USA space agency NASA said on Wednesday that its Mars lander is now targeting a new launch window that begins May 5, 2018, with a Mars landing scheduled for November 26, 2018.

To this point, NASA has already spent $525 million on InSight, but it'll cost another $150 million to actually fix the problem - putting the initiative overbudget to the point that it would likely delay other projects already in the pipeline.

NASA's InSight Mars rover was supposed to have lifted off on March 4, but engineers found a critical problem with the probe in December 2015 that pretty much derailed any hopes of hitting the launch date.

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NASA had been considering ending the mission after a leak in the vacuum chamber surrounding a key instrument - which was built by the French space agency, known as CNES - couldn't be fixed in time for the planned March 2016 launch. This artist's concept depicts the InSight lander on Mars after the lander's robotic arm has deployed a seismometer and a heat probe directly onto the ground. Today, NASA said the cost of the two-year delay was still being assessed.

SEIS' sensors are meant to measure seismic movements as small as the diameter of an atom. The vacuum chamber was leaking.

Prior to the implementation of the new inflatable technology by the NASA for slowing spacecraft, making way into the atmospheres of other planets, it will be first needed to be within the tight confines of a rocket.

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"The quest to understand the interior of Mars has been a long-standing goal of planetary scientists for decades", Grunsfeld added. "We're excited to be back on the path", John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator, said in a statement, Xinhua reported. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, will take over the redesign, building and testing of the vacuum chamber, while the French space agency focuses on the science instrument itself. Just last week, astronaut Scott Kelly completed a 340-day mission at the International Space Station that's considered a scientific steppingstone for sending humans to the red planet in the 2030s.

A different mission to Mars is due for launch from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday.

Another NASA Mars lander - this one a car-sized, wheeled rover - is scheduled for a 2020 launch. The inflatable orange ring works like a parachute, using the drag of a planet's atmosphere to slow down a spacecraft, protecting it from the intense atmospheric heat and also allowing it to have a softer landing.

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