NASA revises plan to bring Mars samples back to Earth

NASA announced Tuesday a revamp of its plan to collect samples on Mars and return them to Earth.

Agency officials said they decided to abandon parts of their original plan to reduce technical difficulties and costs of the mission and shorten the time needed to return samples.

Thanks to its sample return program on Mars, NASA has for more than two decades is getting closer to the goal of recovering samples of Martian soil that NASA’s Perseverance rover has been collecting since 2021. To do this, the agency had been working on the development of several new spacecraft to relay samples from the Martian surface and bring them back to Earth.

NASA said in its announcement that it was changing the plan for the spacecraft that would land on Mars to retrieve the samples and explore two different new options.

One option is to attempt a style of landing similar to what NASA successfully executed with the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers. As each rover made its descent, rockets were fired to slow the spacecraft, and a complex sky crane then lowered them to the Martian surface.

The second option would be to work with private space companies to send a new lander to Mars.

NASA plans to study both possibilities in tandem before making a final decision on which to use in 2026.

Space industry experts have been speculating for months about the fate of the Mars sample return program, which has fallen behind schedule due to its increased budget.

“The cost started to accelerate to the point where early last year it was thought it could reach $11 billion, and you wouldn’t even get the samples back until 2040,” said the NASA Administrator Bill Nelson during a press conference. Tuesday. “It was simply unacceptable.”

NASA’s original plan called for developing a “sample recovery lander”, which would have been equipped with two helicopters to retrieve the sealed sample tubes of rock, soil and atmosphere that Perseverance collected and put into storage. hidden. The lander would also have carried a rocket to launch the samples from the Martian surface.

Perseverance, which landed in 2021, explored a 28-mile-wide basin north of the Martian equator that scientists believe was home to an ancient river delta.

NASA’s previous plan called for helicopters to gather the rover’s samples, after which the lander’s robotic arm would load them into the rocket. Then, the rocket would lift off from the Martian surface and release a capsule containing the samples while in orbit around the planet.

Then would come another cosmic relay: the capsule would be intercepted by a spacecraft designed by the European Space Agency, and the precious cargo would begin its journey to Earth.

Details of the design of another lander and how it would collect samples once on Mars are not yet clear. NASA, however, said that both new options involve a smaller rocket system to lift off from the Martian surface.

Both alternatives would still use the vehicle developed in Europe for the return trip to Earth.

Nelson said changes to NASA’s plan could allow samples to return to Earth as soon as 2035, but he added that, depending on NASA funding, the timeline could extend to 2039.

He said the sky crane option would likely cost between $6.6 billion and $7.7 billion and the commercial route would likely cost between $5.8 billion and $7.1 billion.

NASA officials stressed the importance of studying the samples.

“Mars Sample Return will allow scientists to understand the planet’s geological history and the changing climate on this arid planet where life may have existed in the past and shed light on the beginnings of the solar system before life doesn’t start here on Earth,” Nicky Fox, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. “It will also prepare us to safely send the first human explorers to Mars.”

However, NASA has faced increased scrutiny in recent years regarding the cost and schedule of several of its largest programs, including the Mars Sample Return initiative and the Artemis Moon Return Program. .

The United States also faces increased competition from China, which has made rapid progress in its space program over the past decade. Last year, China became the first country to collect and return samples from the far side of the Moon, and Chinese authorities announced plans to launch a mission to retrieve samples from Mars and return them to Earth by around 2031.

Nelson said, however, that NASA’s plan is more complex than Chinese officials have discussed publicly and that the U.S. program is focused on answering fundamental questions about the history of Mars, rather than a race to ‘space.

“We cannot compare the two missions,” he said. “Will people say there’s a race? Well, of course people will say that. But these are two completely different missions.