Thursday, NASA announced they would be delaying their launch of a Mars robotic mission until 2011, although it had been previously scheduled for the following year.

The space agency stated that the Mars Science Laboratory would not fly in 2009 because technical issues and increased costs had rendered the mission to be postponed for 2 years.

Moreover, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said that going by the schedule would give rise to many risks the agency was not willing to take, especially for a flagship mission.

"Despite exhaustive work in multiple shifts by a dedicated team, the progress in recent weeks has not come fast enough on solving technical challenges and pulling hardware together," said Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The right and smart course now for a successful mission is to launch in 2011."

The advanced rover is one of the most technologically challenging interplanetary missions ever designed. It will use new technologies to adjust its flight while descending through the Martian atmosphere, and to set the rover on the surface by lowering it on a tether from a hovering descent stage.

Advanced research instruments make up a science payload 10 times the mass of instruments on NASA's Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. The Mars Science Laboratory is engineered to drive longer distances over rougher terrain than previous rovers. It will employ a new surface propulsion system.

The Mars Science Laboratory mission has significantly exceeded budget and the delay will add another $400 million to its cost, which is said to come amount to $2 billion.

This is not the first time the space agency has postponed a mission to Mars, since last year NASA put off a previously set for 2011 launch of a $485 million atmospheric probe to the planet, reasoning that a conflict of interest in the selection process had prompted the delay.

The Mars Science Laboratory is aimed at determining whether the planet was inhabitable during its early years. For the study, the Lab will carry high-tech equipment in order to examine rocks and soil in more detail than previous Mars surface missions have done.

Given that Mars and Earth come as close to each other as to render it possible for probes to be launched to the Red Planet every 26 months, NASA will have a window from October to December, 2011 to blast off the Mars Science Laboratory rover mission.