Check, check—is this thing on? NASA officials will announce an update on the Mars Sample Return mission tomorrow afternoon, providing some eagerly awaited clarity on one of the most hyped planetary science goals of the century to date.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Nicky Fox, the agency’s Science Mission Directorate associate administrator, will host the call. The call’s audio will be streamed on the NASA website at 1 p.m. ET tomorrow, January 7.
Top of tomorrow’s docket is how NASA aims to bring Martian rock samples collected by the Perseverance rover to Earth in a safe, cost-effective, and timely manner. So far, that has proven an insurmountable challenge.
The Mars sample return has everything to do with the Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021. Since then, the rover has been collecting pieces of Martian rock that scientists consider compelling enough to be retrieved for study on Earth.
Thus, the sample return mission revolves around Perseverance. But the rover has done its job, collecting plenty of Martian rocks that hold clues to the planet’s geological, hydrological, and possibly astrobiological history. The sample tubes also contain a bit of Martian atmosphere; all told, having samples of another planet on Earth will allow scientists to learn much more than what they can do remotely with rovers (just look at the Apollo samples, which continue to reveal new insights about the age and evolution of Earth’s Moon).
The sample return mission has not been continuing at pace; in 2022, NASA and ESA tweaked the mission citing unacceptable levels of risk. In September 2023, an independent review board’s report found the sample return mission was essentially unfeasible, and the following month NASA went back to the drawing board to make the mission possible. In November 2023, the agency paused work on the mission.
Last April, NASA called on industry partners to help out. In a teleconference held at the time, Nelson said that the cited mission cost of $11 billion was simply too expensive, and the anticipated sample recovery date of 2040 is “unacceptably too long.” In October, NASA selected the public company Rocket Lab to figure out an alternative plan to the Mars Sample Return as it was originally conceived.
Mars Sample Return is an ambitious project which could revolutionize our understanding of Mars, one of the most similar planets to Earth in our solar system.
Recovering the samples is of paramount importance to NASA, but whether the agency can cut the mission’s bloated timeline and trim the fat that saw mission cost estimates nearly quadruple in four years is another question. We may get some answers tomorrow—but you’ll have to tune in to find out.
