Slashdot Mirror
NASA Has Suspended Its Next Mission To Mars (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: NASA has suspended its next mission to Mars after problems with a French-built seismological instrument could not be fixed in time for the scheduled launch. The mission, a lander called InSight that was to listen for tremors on Mars as a way of understanding the planet's interior, will not launch in March 2016, the agency said today. NASA has not announced a new launch date, but because of the relative orbits of Mars and Earth, the agency will have to wait at least 26 months before it can try to launch again. The troublesome instrument is called the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure; the Max Planck Institute, one of the instrument's developers, has a nice page outlining SEIS's construction and function.
It seems that the CNES took out an article today saying that the instrument was repaired. See the cached content here.
It is saying that the core of the instrument is a titanium sphere keeping inner sensors in a 0.25 mbar vacuum (at most). This is about 40000x less than atmospheric pressure on earth. What they saw is that the pressure inside the sphere went up from 0 to 30 mbar in a month. They found a production defect on one of the sensors connectors going through the shell but it seems that they were able to seal it correctly with some resin. They also found a second leakage problem around the pump creating the vacuum, which could be fixed as well.
They are currently running tests to determine if everything is ok. According to the article, the launch could be re-scheduled to March 18th.
French productivity per hour is on par with other western countries, they just work fewer hours on average. And that means they have a better work/life balance than most other western countries.