NASA delays Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter again

NASA delays Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter again

US space agency NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) has again delayed the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The probe was scheduled to be launched today but the NASA cancelled the launch just a few minutes before blast-off. The craft is expected to arrive in orbit around Mars in March looking for traces of water on the planet and hunt for landing sites for future manned missions.

This latest craft MRO is quite technically advanced compared to the earlier crafts NASA sent to Mars. It is capable of delivering 10 times more data back to earth than those crafts. The problem on MRO was related to the hydrogen fuel tank sensors, which showed a “dry” reading when they should have been reading “wet”. This problem is pretty similar to the issues noticed on the recently concluded Space Shuttle mission, which delayed the launch by a couple of days.

Launch director Chuck Duvall said about these issues: “It’s not really clear what the cause was. We’ll continue to troubleshoot and hopefully resolve for an attempt tomorrow.” The MRO is the size of a small bus and weighs about 2,000kg. It would be carrying quite complicated and sophisticated devices to the red planet to conduct its studies.

Richard Zurek, MRO project scientist said in a statement about their mission: “A prime goal of ours is to achieve higher spatial resolution in our observations of the surface and of the atmosphere and of the sub-surface by radar. When you increase your resolution and you still want to cover adequate areas of the planet what you have to be able to do is return much more data than previous missions have done.”