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from the I-feel-the-Earth^w^wMars-move-under-my-feet dept.
A NASA mission previously scheduled to launch a robotic lander towards Mars in March may face up to a two year delay due to a fault in a seismometer provided by the French space agency:
The InSight spacecraft was scheduled to take off between 4-30 March and land on the Red Planet six months later to examine Mars' geology in depth.
Nasa said it had decided to call off the launch because the agency was unable to fix a leak affecting the seismometer, which required a vacuum seal to cope with harsh conditions on Mars. The instrument is designed to measure ground movements.
"A decision on a path forward will be made in the coming months, but one thing is clear: Nasa remains fully committed to the scientific discovery and exploration of Mars," Nasa's John Grunsfeld was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency. The next time the earth and Mars are favourably aligned for a launch will be in 2018.
[More after the break.]
According to Wikipedia:
InSight is a robotic Mars lander planned for launch in March 2016. The name is a backronym for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.
The mission's objective is to place a stationary lander equipped with a seismometer and heat transfer probe on the surface of Mars to study its early geological evolution.
Prior coverage: Mars Spacecraft Shipped to California for March Launch
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday December 23 2015, @06:14PM
I am sure it was thoroughly tested. But like murphy's law states: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Most likely the components which were built and tested in a lab are not flight hardware. The actual flight hardware is likely a different instrument built from scratch to the spec developed in the lab. It should have worked if built using the same spec but there are plenty of variables to go awry during manufacture. Happens all the time and i've seen it happen to very critical, very expensive flight hardware going into satellites.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday December 23 2015, @09:54PM
I would have thought this was a long solved problem, since its not exactly rare to need instrumentation inside of a sealed tank in spacecraft.
You can't just bench test it, you need vibration, heating, cooling tests as well. You say it happens all the time, yet its rare to have a mission put on hold for what is supposedly a common necessity.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.