NASA Has Suspended Its Next Mission To Mars (sciencemag.org)

Posted by timothy on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @05:59AM from the space-is-harsh dept.

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.

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What the eggheads don't consider... by __aaclcg7560 · 2015-12-22 06:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

Relative orbits means having Earth and Mars come together at their closet points every two years to launch a mission. Standard operating procedure for Mars missions. What about the relative orbits of Earth, Venus and Mars for an inward slingshot?