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NASA is looking for innovative methods that could help recover samples collected by the Perseverance rover on Mars in the future.
The rover, which will land on Mars in February 2021, is collecting specimens from Jezero Crater, where there was once an ancient lake and river delta on the red planet. Scientists believe the samples could help them better understand whether life once existed on Mars.
The original design for the Mars Sample Return program, a partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency, was complex. The architecture involved sending multiple missions from Earth to Mars to collect the samples, and then launching the first rocket from the surface of another planet to bring the samples back to Earth.
But there were concerns about the program being too daunting because of complexity, costs and a delayed return date, which was originally expected to happen by 2031, but has been pushed after an assessment by an independent review board. Budget cuts affecting NASA also put the program at risk.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, shared the federal agency’s response to the independent review board on Monday.
Reviews of the program suggested that a Mars Sample return should cost no more than $5 billion to $7 billion, Nelson said. But NASA is forced to deal with the constraints of reduced spending due to budget cuts for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, leaving the agency with a $2.5 billion hit, he said.
“The Mars Sample Return will be one of the most complex missions NASA has ever undertaken. The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, and the 2040 return date is too far away,” Nelson said. “It is no small task to safely land and collect the samples, launch a rocket with the samples from another planet – something that has never been done before – and transport the samples safely more than 33 million miles (53 million kilometers) back to Earth. We need to look outside the box to find a way forward that is affordable and returns samples in a reasonable time frame.”
Nelson said that waiting until 2040 to return the samples to Earth is unacceptable because the 2040s will be “the decade when astronauts land on Mars,” he reiterated during press conference on Monday.
Smaller budgets, rising costs affect Mars Sample Return
An $11 billion price tag for the program would cause NASA to cannibalize other science programs and missions, Nelson said.
Those missions include the NEO Surveyor, or Near-Earth Object, to discover asteroids that could be a threat to Earth; Dragonfly, which will investigate the possible habitation of Saturn’s moon Titan; and missions such as DAVINCI and VERITAS to reveal the secrets of Venus. (The Venus mission names are short for Venus Atmosphere Depth Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging Plus and Venus Reactivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy.)
While Nelson is hopeful that the budget for fiscal year 2026 will not be as constrained, opening up more science funding for NASA, it does not solve the immediate problem of how to address moving forward with the Mars Sample Return .
Therefore, the space agency is opening a call for help.
Innovation and reliable technology
Agency officials will soon announce solicitations on NASA centers and industry to develop a new plan that combines innovation with lessons learned from established technology, according to Fox. NASA is targeting the 2030s for a sample return mission with less complexity, cost and risk, he said.
It’s a quick turnaround for proposals, and the agency hopes to get answers about how best to return samples from Mars by the fall, Nelson said.
The basic requirement of the proposals is to return the 30 scientifically preserved samples that took persistence from a different set of sites, Fox said.
“Mars is very important to us,” Fox said. “It’s one of the only locations that could have life. That said, we understand that we may need to lower the scope of the number of samples to get things done faster.”
The solicitation for a new Mars Sample Return architecture will include a range of samples needed to return to Earth, Fox said.
“We are operating on the basis that this is an important national objective that we return the samples,” Nelson said.
It reinforced the idea that NASA did not want to terminate the program because it was considered too critical, especially as the agency looks to land astronauts on the red planet in the future.
In the meantime, the current decisions will not affect the scientific plan for the Endurance mission to Mars, and the rover continues to collect samples as it explores the crater’s rim, Fox said.
Looking to the future
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, manages the persistence rover mission and other exploration efforts on Mars.
Current efforts for the return program were underway at JPL when switches emerged in February to meet the needs of budget cuts. The new architecture ultimately developed for the sample return mission will determine the scope of JPL’s management oversight, Nelson said.
The European Space Agency also played a major role in the development of the program, and Fox confirmed that the agency is still involved in discussions about the future of the program.
For fiscal year 2025, Fox said she is proposing a budget request of $200 million and that NASA evaluate alternative architectures, which will enable other planetary science to continue at JPL and other NASA centers.
“To organize a mission at this level of complexity, we use many years of lessons on how to run a large mission, including incorporating the input we get from independent reviews,” Fox said. “Our next steps will enable us to take this transformative mission forward and deliver revolutionary science from Mars – providing critical new insights into the origin and evolution of Mars, our solar system, and life on Earth.”
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