According to NASA, there are now two additional possible approaches for bringing significant samples back to Earth from Mars by the 2030s.
The plans offer alternatives for the initial Mars Sample Return initiative. The original concept, which was created by NASA and the European Space Agency, was considered cumbersome after an independent review board estimated that it may cost a staggering as $11 billion. Additionally, the board’s evaluation moved the samples’ anticipated return date from 2031 to 2040, which the head of NASA, Bill Nelson, reaffirmed on Tuesday as a “simply unacceptable” delay.
Nelson said at a news conference Tuesday that the agency will choose between the recently announced strategies which aim to cut mission duration, complexity, and expense by the second half of 2026.
Ever since landing on Mars in February 2021, the NASA Perseverance rover has been collecting dust and rocks. The samples, which originate from Jezero Crater, the location of an old lake and river delta, are thought by scientists to be among the few means of confirming whether life ever existed on the red planet.
However, bringing the organisms back to Earth is a difficult task that might provide an answer to one of humanity’s most pressing queries regarding potential of extraterrestrial life. Multiple spacecraft would be utilized to land on Mars and transport the cache back to Earth in both the program’s original and updated architecture.
NASA suggested in April that its industrial partners and other centers develop new strategies for bringing the samples to Earth in a more efficient and economical manner. 11 of the studies were evaluated by the agency’s Mars Sample Return Strategic Review team, which then provided NASA with recommendations to be further honed by leadership.
Dr. Nicky Fox, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, stated, “We are exploring two new landing options.” Utilizing technology that was previously employed to land the rovers Perseverance and Curiosity on Mars is one option. The other is to take advantage of available industry options.
In the first option, the two rovers that are still exploring Mars will enter, descend, and land using the sky crane approach. According to Nelson, the second will use new commercial partners and capabilities to deploy a “heavy-lift vehicle” lander to Mars, including designs from SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Because of its thin atmosphere, which is thick enough to burn up a spacecraft that isn’t sheltered by an exterior structure with a protective heat shield, Mars has long presented a problem to landers. However, parachutes are insufficient to slow down and facilitate a safe landing because the red planet’s atmosphere is too thin.
Engineers developed a mechanism known as the sky crane to anchor the heavy car-sized rover Curiosity throughout entry, descent, and landing. The spaceship was slowed down during the initial fall using retrorockets, a parachute, and a heat shield.
Then, using a sturdy cable, the sky crane brought the rover down to the red planet’s surface. The sky crane then disengaged and went off the site in a collision. Perseverance was landed using the same concept in 2021, and the team managed to record the audacious descent.
Journey from the Martian surface
Mars Sample Return is humanity’s first mission to bring scientific samples from a habitable planet back to Earth, Fox said.
“We want to bring those back as quickly as possible to study them in state-of-the-art facilities,” she said. “Mars Sample Return will allow scientists to understand the planet’s geological history and the evolution of climate on this barren planet where life may have existed in the past and shed light on the early solar system before life began here on Earth. This will also prepare us to safely send the first human explorers to Mars.”
The agency will proceed with testing the viability of both options and working through the engineering challenges of each plan over the next year at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
The newly proposed strategies provide the potential to return the samples to Earth as early as 2035, or as late as 2039, and with costs that range from $5.5 billion to $7.7 billion — a “far cry” from the original figure, Nelson said.
Also Read : Orca mom is carrying a dead calf for the second time, raising concerns
“Pursuing two potential paths forward will ensure that NASA is able to bring these samples back from Mars with significant cost and schedule saving compared to the previous plan,” Nelson said. “These samples have the potential to change the way we understand Mars, our universe, and — ultimately — ourselves.”
While both options are more streamlined than the original plan, they each contain similar architecture, which requires landing a Mars Ascent Vehicle on the Martian surface. That vehicle will be loaded with the samples collected by Perseverance, and then it will lift off, rendezvousing with the ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter in orbit around Mars.
Then, the orbiter will head back to Earth and drop off the sample capsule, similar to how rocks and dust from the asteroid Bennu were delivered by the OSIRIS-REX mission, Fox said.
There was no easy way to get rid of any single element of the original Mars Sample Return design, so the focus shifted to simplifying each piece, Fox said. For example, NASA opted for a direct return of the samples to Earth, rather than placing them in orbit around the moon, which would require another vehicle to go and fetch them, Nelson said. The biggest difference between each option will be the landing mechanism, Fox said.
For both strategies, the platform that will land on Mars will carry a smaller version of the Mars Ascent Vehicle than previously planned, and the platform’s solar panels will be replaced with a system that can supply power and heat even during dust storms on Mars. This will enable the samples to be returned to Earth sooner, Fox said.
“We are very confident that we can return all 30 samples before 2040 and for less than the $11 billion,” Fox said.
Mars sample return: The path ahead
Teams at JPL will focus on the engineering design for each plan at the same time over the next year, and one of the challenges will be making the sky crane 20% bigger than the one that landed Perseverance, Fox said. Another challenge is designing a Mars Ascent Vehicle that can survive landing on the red planet before launching from it.
The European Space Agency is currently evaluating NASA’s new plans, according to NASA.
Ultimately, President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration will be responsible for requesting an appropriate budget to support the program — and deciding whether they wish to continue with the program at all, Nelson added.
Also Read : The Leonid Meteor Shower: A Celestial Spectacle in Wisconsin
Nelson said he has not discussed the new Mars sample return proposals with Jared Isaacman, the tech billionaire and spaceflight trailblazer Trump has picked to helm NASA, because all discussions are being handled by the transition team, he said.
“But I think it was a responsible thing to do to not hand the new administration just one alternative if they want to have a Mars sample return, which I can’t imagine that they don’t,” Nelson said.
This depicts the satellite-filled sky that is now a reality and getting more crowded every week! This adds together exposures taken over just 30 minutes on an early June night when, from my latitude of 51° N satellites even in low Earth orbit are lit all night by sunlight.
Many of the parallel streaks heading generally horizontal west to east (right to left) may be from groups of SpaceX Starlinks. Others traveling vertically north-south are more likely from Earth observation satellites.
There is at least one natural streak in the image — a meteor at centre, caught by chance on one frame. It appears as a colored and tapered streak. Other uniform undashed streaks may be from high-altitude satellites moving much more slowly.
By comparison, most satellites appear as dashed lines because the image is a blend of many 2-second-long exposures with a gap of one second between exposures when the camera shutter was closed. So the motion of the satellites and image stacking turns them into dashes.
The longer the dashes, the faster the satellite is traveling, with the fastest satellites being the lowest. This is looking due south and all the trails disappear low in the south above the trees, as that’s where the Earth’s shadow is, even on this June night.
So the satellites aren’t lit when they are in that small part of the sky. They emerge from the shadow heading north and disappear into the shadow heading south. The shadow creates the obvious boundary of where satellite trails are visible.
At other times of the year low-orbit satellites are visible only after sunset or before sunrise, especially from lower latitudes. But not near summer solstice, and from higher latitudes.
Previously, China has declared an interest in also returning samples from Mars. The country’s Tianwen-3 mission might launch in 2028 to retrieve the Martian samples, which could be returned to Earth by 2031, although officials previously shared that they may also launch by 2030.
“I don’t think we want the only sample return coming back on the Chinese spacecraft, and that’s just simply a grab and go kind of mission,” Nelson said.
“Whereas ours has been a very methodical process … to find different samples of different layers showing different ages of material and rocks, and when we bring back those 30 samples, it’s going to give quite a history of what Mars was like millions of years ago when there was water in the lake. And the big question: Was there life millions of years ago?”
