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NASA makes major announcement about Mars sample-return mission

By T.K. Randall
April 16, 2024 ·  19 comments

Getting samples from Mars to Earth is very expensive. Image Credit: NASA / JPL The ambitious mission, which has been in the works for years, was to have involved a multi-stage process beginning with the Perseverance rover which has been collecting promising samples for future pickup and analysis.

A second mission, due to launch before the decade is out, was to then see a spacecraft land on the surface, pick up the samples, then return to orbit where it would rendezvous with a third spacecraft.

The final step would have seen this spacecraft leave Mars and return the samples to Earth.

There is one snag, however - it doesn't look as though this plan is actually going to work.

Yesterday, NASA revealed that its current budget would make such a series of missions impossible to achieve before 2040, prompting the space agency to look for a different solution to the problem."The bottom line is that $11bn is too expensive, and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long," said NASA administrator Bill Nelson.

As things stand, the sample caches have been collected by the rover, but finding a way to actually pick them up and return them to the Earth is going to need some out-of-the-box thinking.

As such, NASA is now calling on scientists and industry professionals for help coming up with a new, more budget-friendly solution to collect and return the samples.

"We are looking at out-of-the-box possibilities that could return the samples earlier and at a lower cost," said Dr Nicola Fox, director of NASA's science directorate.

"This is definitely a very ambitious goal, and we're going to need to go after some very innovative new possibilities for design, and certainly leave no stone unturned."

With any luck, an affordable solution will be found in the not-too-distant future.

Source: BBC News | Comments (19)

Tags: Mars