Posted: Mon, Jun 28, 2004, 9:03 PM ET (0103 GMT)
ESA officials announced last week that the deployment of a radar boom on its Mars Express spacecraft would be further delayed while engineers study issues with the boom. The Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument requires the use of two 20-meter booms that are rolled up on the spacecraft. The booms are designed to extend automatically once a pyro is fired, but engineers at Astro Aerospace, the American company that made the boom, raised concerns earlier this year that the booms could recoil and strike the spacecraft. Recent modeling by the company indicated that the booms "might have more movement than previously thought", but didn't indicate whether that movement would pose a problem to the spacecraft. The radar was to have been deployed in April but was delayed when the issue was first noted; ESA officials now say that the deployment has been delayed until "later this year", which may be no sooner than October. MARSIS is designed to study both the planet's atmosphere and subsurface features; in its latter role it may be able to detect subterranean water deposits.
