By 
February 9th, 2016
InSight Mars lander.
Credit: NASA/JPL
NASA’s InSight Mars lander is now safely back at its maker – Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton, Colorado.
The spacecraft was successfully shipped back from Vandenberg Air Force Base to Denver on Saturday, Feb. 6. Its “return to sender” flight was onboard a C-17 aircraft from Vandenberg AFB to Buckley AFB.
InSight is currently housed in the Waterton Canyon campus in Littleton, Colorado company spokesman, Gary Napier, told Inside Outer Space.
A crate containing NASA’s Mars-bound InSight spacecraft was loaded into a C-17 cargo aircraft at Buckley Air Force Base, Denver, for shipment to Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The spacecraft, built by Lockheed Martin Space Systems, was shipped Dec. 16, 2015, for launch in March 2016. The spacecraft is now back at Lockheed Martin due to launch delay.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin
Seismic experiment
NASA decided to suspend the planned March 2016 launch of the Discovery-class Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations Geodesy and Heat Transport (InSight). The launch scrub was due to unsuccessful attempts to repair a leak in a section of the prime instrument in the lander’s science payload.
The problem-plagued instrument was the sensitive Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS).
SEIS is designed to take precise measurements of quakes and other internal activity on Mars to better understand the planet’s history and structure.
Pre-ship photo shows NASA’s InSight Mars lander spacecraft in a Lockheed Martin clean room near Denver. As part of a series of deployment tests, the spacecraft was commanded to deploy its solar arrays in the clean room to test and verify the exact process that it will use on the surface of Mars.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Lockheed Martin
Leak problems
The SEIS had previously failed to retain vacuum conditions – a problem that was fixed. But during follow-up tests in extreme cold temperature (-49 degrees Fahrenheit/-45 degrees Celsius) another leak was detected.
Despite the repairs and the significant efforts of InSight teams, a cold pressure build-up, probably caused by a new leak, was detected on the sphere-shaped SEIS.
NASA officials determined there was insufficient time to resolve another leak, and complete the work and thorough testing required to ensure InSight’s mission.
Core sensors
“The thing that was leaking was the vacuum enclosure of the VBBs (Very Broad Band seismometers), which are the core sensors of the SEIS,” explains W. Bruce Banerdt Principal Investigator for InSight at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.
Credit: NASA/JPL
“We call it the ‘sphere’… although it is only quasi-spherical,” Banerdt told Inside Outer Space. “JPL and the French have been working shoulder to shoulder — both literally and figuratively — since the first leak was detected at the end of August,” he adds.
Along the same lines, teams are jointly putting together a plan forward, Banerdt notes, for producing a robust vacuum enclosure for the presumed launch of InSight in 2018.
Resources:
For more information on the SES, go to this video in French at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3IOKszmnyo
For an English video on InSight, go to:
Posted in Space News
