Meet the 10-foot-tall (3 meters) Mars Ascent Vehicle.
The NASA-ESA Mars sample return campaign features a menagerie of machines to collect and send to Earth select pieces of the Red Planet.The Mars Ascent Vehicle is a small, lightweight, two-stage solid-propellant rocket with a big assignment: blast rock, sediment and atmospheric samples offThe MAV, which is being developed by Lockheed Martin Space of Littleton, Colorado, will be packaged with NASA's Sample Retrieval Lander , another big part of the sample return campaign.
Humanity has never returned pristine samples from Mars before, and there are significant challenges facing the team that's trying to make it happen, explained Steve Sides, Lockheed Martin's senior program manager for the Mars Ascent Vehicle Integrated System based in Huntsville, Alabama. "Throwing a rocket up and getting it to light has been done before, but never on Mars," said Sides. The VECTOR approach minimizes blowback and interference with the SRL, he explained.
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