NASA officials have announced that they have no plan to bring samples of Martian rocks, which could contain signs of life, back to Earth.
The agency’s Perseverance Rover has been exploring the surface of the Red Planet for more than three years, collecting rock and soil samples to provide evidence of life.
By all indications, Perseverance has been successful in its mission to collect samples, but bringing them home is a different story.
A recent report showed that NASA’s original plan to return the samples would cost $11 billion. Now he has concluded that that method would be too expensive and complicated, so he is asking the private sector for help.
NASA’s Perseverance Rover landed on Mars in February 2021 and has been collecting samples ever since.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover captured this mosaic at a location nicknamed ‘Skrinkle Haven.’ Scientists suspect that these bands may have been formed by fast-moving water long ago.
When NASA launched the rover in 2020, it planned to have Perseverance cache the samples for collection by a sample recovery lander.
This lander, scheduled to launch in 2027 or 2028, would carry a rocket that could take the samples off the planet and then orbit Mars until another spacecraft picked them up and brought them back to Earth.
But that plan, approved in 2022, has since hit a major roadblock: NASA budget cuts.
They are now soliciting proposals from private companies and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to find cheaper and faster ways to get the samples to Earth.
NASA officials said the most likely way to achieve their goal was to reuse “tried and true” technologies and strategies from previous missions, saving time and money compared to developing entirely new technology.
This “legacy” or “legacy” technology could be found on other NASA missions that landed on the surface of a distant planet or moon, NASA Science Mission Directorate Nicky Fox said in a press conference on Monday.
“Anything that’s already available is good to use,” he said.
Using technologies already in NASA’s space exploration toolbox would be cheaper, less risky and faster than trying to achieve some new technological leap.
The challenge, Fox said, is that NASA has never landed a spacecraft on another planet and then taken it off again.
At the same time, Fox and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson dodged questions about why a viable plan did not yet exist.
Nelson explained that a more acceptable price for a Mars sample return mission would be in the range of $5 billion to $7 billion, and suggested that budget cuts were to blame for NASA’s resistance to the $11 billion price tag. .
And in fact, NASA’s 2024 and 2025 budgets took a hit with the March budget cuts that came as lawmakers sought to avoid a government shutdown.
As a result, Nelson said moving forward with an $11 billion Mars sample return mission would require “cannibalizing” the budgets of other NASA missions.
He also said NASA lost a total of $2.5 billion from its 2024 budget, including $1 billion from its science budget (the part of the budget that deals with research, as opposed to rockets).
Perseverance has been collecting carefully selected samples from the surface of Mars. Some of them you carry with you, while others are left in sample tubes like this one for later collection.
This illustration shows a concept for NASA’s Mars Sample Return Program. It would involve Perseverance delivering samples to a lander, which would then send them back to Earth on a different ship.
One of Perseverance’s big finds came earlier this year, when it explored an area that could offer some of the evidence of life that NASA is searching for.
The Perseverance rover has been exploring Jezero Crater, where it identified water-deposited sediments, confirming speculation that the formation flowed with water three billion years ago.
Perseverance has been collecting samples from the surface of Mars, carefully chosen by scientists on Earth.
Some of these samples are transported on the rover, while others are left in sample tubes on the Martian surface for later collection.
The long-standing concept for the Mars Sample Return mission was that Perseverance would deliver samples to a lander, which would transfer them to a spacecraft that could be launched into space and return to Earth.
Something like this may end up happening, but for now, the details of the plan are a big question mark.
Several journalists attempted to ask Nelson and Fox why a workable plan had not been implemented since the beginning of the Perseverance mission and why traditional technology was not a priority from the beginning.
But they deflected questions or gave vague answers.
Until now, the plan to return samples to Earth from Mars seemed resolved.
But is not.
A key goal of the Perseverance mission to Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient microbial life. NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover acquired this image using its onboard left navigation camera (Navcam).
“I have asked our people to request information from the industry, to [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory] and to all NASA centers, and to report this fall on an alternative plan that will get [the samples] back faster and cheaper,” Nelson said at Monday’s news conference.
The new direction for the Mars Sample Return Program is in response to an independent review conducted in 2023 that showed “near zero probability” that NASA could reach the mission’s proposed 2028 launch date.
The report also says there is no “credible” way to get the samples home with the funds available.
The review board concluded that it would cost up to $11 billion to bring the samples home and would not be achieved until 2040 at that price.
“The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive, and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long,” Nelson said. “It is the 2040s when we will take astronauts to Mars.”
Nelson said there were people who argued that the program should be scrapped and the Perseverance samples abandoned, but he said it was too important to the United States that they be returned.
For now, NASA has $310 million to dedicate to the mission this year.
NASA today opened proposals, which would provide research groups with funds to study sample return strategies.
Proposals are due May 17 and once grants are awarded, groups will have 90 days to return their studies to NASA.
Fox and Nelson said there should be a plan by late fall or early winter of this year.
They said Perseverance will continue collecting samples for now, as long as it remains healthy.