NASA has announced that a new mission will be needed to recover the rock samples collected by Perseverance on Mars
NASA bit off more than it can chew when it sent the Perseverance rover to Mars to collect samples. The mission, which already cost $2.4 billion, landed the rover in Jezero Crater, an ideal place to search for fossils of Martian microbes that may have existed when the planet was full of lakes and rivers. Perseverance’s main mission is to collect rock and sediment samples along the lake floor and crater rim, in hopes of finding a sign that life once thrived on the red planet. The rover has done a great job – it has collected 24 samples so far – but NASA no longer knows how to bring the samples back to Earth for analysis.
NASA’s old plan costs 11 billion and would take too long
NASA’s original design for the retrieval mission, Mars Sample Return, is no longer feasible. NASA’s original proposal for returning samples to Earth is “incredibly complicated,” David Parker, director of space exploration at the European Space Agency, said in 2021. The idea was to launch two rockets to Mars, one with a lander and the other with an orbiter. The lander would be the largest ever sent to Mars. It would land near the sample stash that Perseverance had set up, deploy a rover to retrieve the sample tubes, and load them onto a small rocket attached to the lander.
Costs too high
Then the rocket would launch the samples into Mars orbit, where it would eject them toward the orbiter, which would be NASA’s largest spacecraft ever sent to Mars. The orbiter is expected to take the samples and return to Earth. The mission plan relied on about $4 billion in new technologies and a decade of mission design and construction. But the cost has ballooned to $8-11 billion since Perseverance landed at Jezero Crater. Further analysis confirmed that it would take two decades rather than one to complete recovery.
NASA seeks reputable companies
NASA needs to receive concrete proposals from companies or laboratories by May 17th. At that point the agency will choose a few of these contestants to develop their ideas over a 90-day period, with complete proposals by late fall or early winter. Some of NASA’s most proven brands include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and SpaceX. Startups like Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are setting foot in NASA through the agency’s New Moon program.
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