But don't panic yet. Unlike the Mars Curiosity rover, which infamously missed its 2009 launch window and added hundreds of millions of dollars to its cost, InSight's instrument problems are the responsibility of an international partner. NASA's costs associated with InSight's delay will likely be much lower than Curiosity, which required a much larger team to troubleshoot a variety of hardware issues. I also would be very surprised if NASA walks away from a nearly-complete Mars spacecraft.

But this is speculation. Even John Grunsfeld doesn't know the answers yet. More work will be done early next year to better understand the implications of this delay.

There is a bright side of today's delay: NASA and CNES found this problem while the spacecraft was still on Earth. There's not exactly a lot of experienced engineers on the surface of Mars able to fix a problem such as this. If this hadn't been found, and the mission had launched on time, NASA would have landed a spacecraft that would fail one of its major science goals. This problem can still (theoretically) be fixed.

Another bright side is that, assuming this mission will continue, we will see a NASA planetary launch in 2018. We will have something to look forward to during the otherwise barren years for NASA's planetary program between the launch of OSIRIS-REx (Fall 2016) and the Mars 2020 rover (Fall 2020).

This is a bitter pill to swallow right after the great news for NASA's budget in 2016. We'll know more in a few months, but until then, it's good to keep some perspective. ESA will launch to Mars in March with its Trace Gas Orbiter. In September, NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission will launch to an asteroid. Juno orbits Jupiter in the Summer. As for InSight? Bruce Banerdt, the principal investigator on the mission summed it up: "I'm a patient man. I've been working on this for 25 years, this is a minor setback, not a disaster."