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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.
Right after NASA's funding increase got signed.
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?
So, scientists are shaken up over the delayed seismometer mission?
Table-ized A.I.
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.
I sometimes wonder about that. Most people think of space as being OUTWARD from Earth.
I don't think it's a quesiton of OUTWARD/INWARD, but more about being practical and efficient.
Since Mars is in an OUTWARD orbit, our spacecraft most fly OUTWARD when Earth and Mars are at their closet points.
That also happens to be the shortest and thus fastest route between earth and venus.
I get a lot of negative comments whenever I mention a Venus flyby, which has an INWARD orbit from both Earth and Mars, but can still be used as a slingshot between the two planets.
Except that this is a much more complicated trajectory, and is a lot longer distance and will probably take a lot more time. :-D ) so I won't probably even be competent to compute if I wanted.
I'm too lazy to compute the time necessary and it's also absolutely outside of my field of work (I am a doctor, creimer! Not an asto-physicist !
At some point of time you have to ask, is better worth : ...wait 2 years for next close window ? ...wait a couple of months for the perfect earth-venus-mars alignement , then launch a probe on that trajectory, which is probably going take a year (numbers sponsored by the "out of my ass" department) ? so in the end the probe will perhaps only arrive a couple of month earlier than waiting for the next short route ?
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there's a small difference between launching a probe deep-space on a 10 years mission, were you can afford fumbling around a couple of months to take advantage of a better inward flyby. On the 10+ years of the mission, it's just small detour.
Is it better:
- take a short route which has already been taken several times in the past, and that we know works well ?
- take a newer much longer route, more complex, where the slighest deviation is going to have a much bigger impact at the end ?
Getting to Mars is not trivial. Before the current strike of successful landings, there has been a long string of failed attempts. Replacing this with a much more complex and longer route is bound to have more hiccups.
Is it better:
- to spend only a few months between earth and mars ?
- to spend ~N year(s) (according to OOMA dept.) while at the same time coming as close as venus ?
This is a delivery mission. The point is to drop some delicate equipment on the Martian surface and start doing measures there ASAP.
It's not a mission about recording as much stuff in space as possible. (although it will probably be done but as a secondary goal).
The less time the equipment spends outside of the protection of planetary magnetic fields, the less time that it spends in direct exposition to solar radiation, the better.
Replacing a short earth-mars trip with a much longer earth-venus-mars trip dramatically increases the risk that your payload happens to get fried by excessive solar radiation.
And last and not list ?
- Is it better to rush things to be ready for the next earth-venus-mars alignement ?
- Take 2 years to make the seimic equipement ready, polished and reliable ?
For fuck's sake: it's *France* we're speaking about, not *Sweeden*. Do no mix them. Both countries happen to work less than 36 hours a week. BUT only the second one actually gets things done. The first one has a massive tendency to consider "on strike"/"public demonstrations" as a soft of national sport.
The time waiting until the next direct earth-mars window give more headroom to the project to be finished on time.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
When reached for comments NASA said "We wanted to fix the problem, but every time we called France they were on a mandatory work break and they had gone over there 5 hour a week work week schedule already!"
If you have a 35 hour working week, it just means that if you need 70 hours work on a project you have to employ two people. Big deal.
Not everyone shares the US obsession with working as much unpaid overtime as possible to show how non-socialist you are.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it