NASA’s Perseverance Rover, nicknamed Percy, in 2023 created the first “sample depot on another world” by putting down ten rock sample tubes that are slated to be returned to Earth as part of the Mars Sample Return Campaign. One problem, though — that plan is too expensive and will only be executed by the year 2040.
“The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive, and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long. It’s the decade of the 2040s that we’re going to be landing astronauts on Mars,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson in a press statement. Nelson attributed this to the 2025 budget of the space agency as well as additional budget cuts.
An independent review of the return program conducted last year referred to it as a highly constrained and challenging campaign that had unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning. For context, the cost of the whole program was estimated to be around $3 billion in 2020.
“Safely landing and collecting the samples, launching a rocket with the samples off another planet – which has never been done before – and safely transporting the samples more than 33 million miles back to Earth is no small task. We need to look outside the box to find a way ahead that is both affordable and returns samples in a reasonable timeframe,” added Nelson.
The space agency is working with internal offices to develop a new plan based on innovative and proven technology. It is also soliciting architectural proposals from the industry to return samples in the 2030s along with lowering cost, risk and mission complexity.
“NASA does visionary science – and returning diverse, scientifically-relevant samples from Mars is a key priority. To organize a mission at this level of complexity, we employ decades of lessons on how to run a large mission, including incorporating the input we get from conducting independent reviews. Our next steps will position us to bring this transformational mission forward and deliver revolutionary science from Mars – providing critical new insights into the origins and evolution of Mars, our solar system, and life on Earth,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate at NASA, in a press statement.
According to the current plan, both NASA and the European Space Agency are meant to work together on the first effort to bring something back from Mars. ESA’s “fetch” rover is supposed to take the samples collected by Perseverance and take them to a NASA-provided Mars ascent vehicle which will then launch into Mars’s orbit. Then, an Earth Return Orbiter will take these samples from the ascent vehicle and bring them back to our planet.
But now, those plans could change, and other stakeholders might be brought in on the retrieval effort. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also chimed in on X, formerly Twitter, claiming that the company’s Starship would be capable of bringing back “serious tonnage” from Mars. But even Starship is nowhere near ready for flight. It successfully launched on a test in April without any explosions but SpaceX lost communications with it after it entered space. It could still be a lot of time before Starship is a suitable launch vehicle, and even longer for it to be a Mars return vehicle.
© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
First uploaded on: 16-04-2024 at 18:41 IST
Tags: NASA Mars sample return program expensive long Technology News
