NASA Is One Step Closer To Bringing Mars Samples To Earth

Source: ExtremeTech, Adrianna Nine
Photo: Artist’s rendering of a Mars lander that could retrieve Perseverance’s samples and send them to Earth. (NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC/MSFC)

The agency is starting down two different paths toward the samples’ return, but only one will bring the red rocks home.

NASA kicked off the new year with a major announcement: It’s officially tackling the issue of bringing Mars samples to Earth. Though the agency’s Perseverance rover started collecting Martian regolith four years ago, the Mars Sample Return program’s rising costs have made it difficult for officials to land on a specific transportation plan. Now, after investigating a handful of alternate return strategies, the agency has selected two to pursue this year. But only the winning strategy will bring the red rocks home.

In a media briefing on Tuesday, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Science Mission Directorate leader Nicky Fox explained that NASA’s original sample return plan had been nixed the year prior. The initial plan would have involved a Mars lander to which Perseverance could have passed the baton, allowing a rocket within the lander to depart from Mars and hop on over to the Moon, where the samples would be retrieved. But according to Nelson, that strategy would have brought the Mars Sample Return program’s total cost to $11 billion, and the samples wouldn’t have made it to Earth until 2040.

“That was just simply unacceptable,” Nelson said during the briefing.

Instead, NASA pieced together a Mars Sample Return Strategic Review team, which would field studies focused on various return methods from across the aerospace industry. The team investigated or rejected strategies based on their ability to reduce risk, cost, and the mission’s timeline. In the end, it chose two methods to begin pursuing in 2025.

The first method involves NASA’s existing “sky crane” architecture, which it successfully used to land Curiosity in 2012 and Perseverance in 2021. This approach uses a large heat shield and parachute for the spacecraft’s initial descent, then slows it down with retrorockets before gently placing the spacecraft on the planet’s surface with a strong cable. Theoretically, the sky crane approach could allow NASA to land a spacecraft on Mars, snag Perseverance’s samples, and return directly to Earth—a far simpler, and therefore cheaper, alternative to NASA’s original plan.

NASA’s second plan is to leverage existing commercial partners, such as SpaceX or Blue Origin, who could devise their own retrieval methodologies. This approach would bring the samples to Earth as early as 2035 and land the Mars Sample Return program’s total cost between $5.8 and $7.1 billion. Nelson said NASA is currently exploring a number of these avenues, but did not specify what the actual return might look like.

For both of these paths, success means bringing home 30 of Perseverance’s 43 cigar-sized titanium sample tubes. And while NASA is now investigating the viability of both plans, only one will have the honor of retrieving the samples. The agency expects to make a final decision in the second half of 2026; the timing of the samples’ return will then depend on how efficiently Congress can fund the mission.

“The samples that we have been collecting on Mars are very carefully selected to provide groundbreaking opportunities for research,” Fox said during the briefing. “Bringing them back will revolutionize our understanding of the planet Mars and indeed our place in the solar system.”

https://www.extremetech.com/science/nasa-is-one-step-closer-to-bringing-mars-samples-to-earth