NASA Mars mission gets postponed until 2018
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.029644
New York Times : Because of an irreparable leak in the vacuum enclosure of its InSight spacecraft, NASA has decided to postpone its next Mars mission for two years. The agency had announced in December that InSight would not be ready for its scheduled launch later this month. The two-year delay is necessary because Mars will not come in relatively close proximity to Earth again until 31 July 2018. In the meantime, NASA plans to redesign and build a new enclosure for the spacecraft, although the additional cost of that fix has yet to be determined. InSight—which stands for interior exploration using seismic investigations, geodesy, and heat transport—will use several geophysical instruments to study Mars’s deep interior.