NASA adjusts its strategy for collecting and returning Martian samples, aiming to reduce costs and accelerate the timeline.
NASA on Tuesday announced an overhaul to its plan to collect samples from Mars and return them to Earth. Agency officials said they have decided to scrap parts of their original plan to cut down on the mission’s technical difficulty and cost and to shorten the timeline for when the samples could be brought back.
Through its Mars Sample Return Program, NASA has for more than two decades been inching toward the goal of retrieving samples of Martian soil that NASA’s Perseverance rover has been collecting since 2021. To do that, the agency had been working to develop multiple new spacecraft to relay the samples off the Martian surface and fly them back to Earth. NASA said in its announcement it is changing the plan for the spacecraft that will land on Mars to retrieve the samples and exploring two new, different options. One of the options 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 an intricate 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 pursue both possibilities in tandem before it makes a final decision about which to use in 2026. Space industry experts had speculated for months about the fate of the Mars Sample Return Program, which has fallen behind schedule as its budget has swelled. “The cost began to accelerate to the point that earlier this past year, it was thought that it could be as much as $11 billion, and you would not even get the samples back until 2040,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said at a news briefing Tuesday. “That was just simply unacceptable.” NASA’s original plan called for developing a “sample retrieval lander,” which would have been equipped with two helicopters to retrieve the sealed sample tubes of rock, soil and atmosphere that Perseverance has collected and cache
NASA Mars Sample Return Perseverance Spacecraft Cost Reduction
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