NASA: ‘New plan needed to bring back rocks from Mars’

The quest to return Martian rock samples to Earth to see if they contain traces of past life is undergoing a major overhaul.

The US space agency has said current mission designs will not allow material to be returned by 2040 with existing funding, and the $11bn (£9bn) to make it happen sooner is not sustainable. ing.

NASA plans to explore ideas for cheaper and faster alternatives.

The company plans to consider a solution later this year.

Bringing back rock samples from Mars is considered a top priority in planetary exploration, and has been for decades.

Just as moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts revolutionized our understanding of the history of the early solar system, material from Mars will reshape our ideas about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. There is a possibility.

But NASA now acknowledges that efforts to accomplish sample recovery are completely impractical in the current financial environment.

“Bottom line: $11 billion is too high, and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters on a conference call Monday.

The former US senator said he will not allow other government agencies’ science missions to be “cannibalized” by Mars projects.

So he’s looking for fresh thinking from within NASA and from industry.

The Mars Sample Return (MSR) program is a joint venture with the European Space Agency (Esa).

Today, the current architecture is already in use in the sense that NASA’s Perseverance rover is collecting and cataloging rock samples on Mars for return.

A follow-up mission dedicated to taking the rocket to the surface of Mars was scheduled to launch later this decade.

Once loaded onto the lifter, Perseverance’s samples will be sent skyward, where they will meet up with a European-built spacecraft that will pick up the samples and head back to Earth.

Approximately 300g of Martian material was expected to be packed into a capsule and land in Utah in the western United States in 2033.

However, an independent review reported last September found flaws in the way the mission design was implemented. It is questionable whether the schedule can be maintained, and even if it were, the cost would likely rise to between $8 billion and $11 billion.

In a response released Monday, NASA said it disagrees with that assessment and wants to reopen discussions about the best way forward.

“We’re looking at turnkey possibilities to return samples faster and at a lower cost,” said Dr. Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s Science Directorate.

“This is definitely a very ambitious goal, and we need to explore very innovative new possibilities for design, and we definitely need to leave no stone unturned.”

Those new possibilities could include smaller, simpler rockets, she said.

Dr Fox told BBC News that Mr Ether remains a key figure in the effort. In fact, Europe’s key contribution, the Earth Return Orbiter (ERO), could be launched slightly later than currently envisaged, perhaps in 2030.

Dr. Orson Sutherland, Esa’s Mars Exploration Group Leader, said his organization would carefully consider NASA’s response plan.

“Our priority remains to ensure the best path forward to achieving MSR’s groundbreaking scientific goals and laying the foundations for future human missions to Mars.” he said.

Nelson emphasized that NASA remains fully committed to MSR.

However, it would have to fit within a sustainable budget, which he described as between $5 billion and $7 billion.

The overwhelming scientific imperative behind MSR was underscored by Perseverance’s latest research in recent days.

The robot is working in a large crater called Jezero, which is thought to have been home to a large lake some 3.8 billion years ago. This is a very promising scenario for the existence and preservation of microorganisms.

Perseverance excavated and unearthed a rock believed to have been placed on the edge of the lake.

Purdue University professor Bryony Hogan, one of the spacecraft’s senior scientists, said these samples are particularly interesting.

“Currently, Perseverance carries three samples of rocks cemented with silica and carbonates, both of which are great for preserving traces of ancient life on Earth. It works,” she told BBC News.

“We believe some of the samples may be sandstones deposited in ancient lakes, but we are evaluating other origins as well. In any case, these rocks may be These are the exact types of samples that came to Mars in 2017, and we are very interested in them and hope to bring them back to our lab on Earth. ”