NASA’s Mars Ascent Vehicle will attempt a wildly unconventional liftoff to bring Red Planet samples back to Earth.
Within a decade, a small rover on Mars will pick up samples of rock left by a previous mission. It will then load them into a rocket secured within a small platform on a flat patch of the planet’s surface. Once the rocket’s hatch has closed, the platform will toss it upward on its side, a bit like a thrown American football.
The general outline for how this collection will take place is already clear, but key details remain undetermined. For example, where—and in how many locations—will the samples be cached? What will the “fetch rover” that will collect them—to be built by the European Space Agency —look like? And perhaps most crucially, how will the samples successfully rocket off the surface of Mars and back to Earth? “This launch off another planet will be history-making,” Zurbuchen says.
NASA says the MAV will launch to Mars in 2026 or later, and some have forecasted that the likely date will be 2028. It will be stored inside a landing platform not unlike those of predecessors such as NASA’s InSight lander. InSight touched down on Mars in 2018, performing a propulsive landing rather than relying on the more complex Sky Crane system required for the heavier Perseverance rover and its kin, Curiosity.
Then the real fun begins. Over the past few years, Chatellier and his team at JPL have been grappling with the surprisingly hard problem of how, exactly, to launch a small rocket from Mars. “We started with the basic idea of pointing [the MAV] on a rail and launching it off a platform,” Chatellier says. But the rail would need to be heavy and almost as long as the lander itself.
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