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This mission is an ambitious endeavor. Securing pristine parts of Mars could help scientists determine whether life once existed on Mars.However, the future of the project The outlook has been uncertain since last fall, when an independent review board issued a damning report saying the mission needed a management overhaul amid potential cost overruns and delays.
The board’s 2020 report estimated it would cost between $3.8 billion and $4.4 billion to return the samples. Currently, the estimated cost over the life of the mission is between $8.4 billion and $10.9 billion, with the samples arriving on Earth in 2040.
it will put The price of Mars Sample Return is the same as the price of the James Webb Space Telescope, a technological marvel that currently observes the universe from orbit around the Sun, about a million miles from Earth. It took Webb decades to reach orbit, and he ate up more NASA science funding than anyone expected.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a press conference Monday that the estimated return date of 2040 is “unacceptable.”
“Astronauts will land on Mars in the decade of the 2040s. $11 billion is also unacceptable,” Nelson said.
The high cost of Mars sample returns comes at a time when NASA’s science budget is not enough to fund all the telescopes and space probes already underway or planned. With Congressional support for the mission uncertain, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory laid off about 8 percent of its workforce earlier this year.
Still, Mars sample return is a top priority in the planetary science community’s decades-long exploration process, elevating the most promising missions from a storm of proposals. But recovering Martian pristine debris for laboratory analysis on Earth requires an unprecedented technological feat. NASA and its partners, including the European Space Agency, cannot simply send a probe to the surface of Mars and expect it to launch again and return to Earth. Instead, this mission requires a fleet of spaceships acting as a team.
The Perseverance rover that landed on Mars in 2021 will collect samples of Martian rock and soil at Jezero Crater, where scientists believe a river flowed into a lake billions of years ago.・Kept in storage. The spacecraft is funded separately from the sample return project.
“I think it’s fair to say we’re fully committed to recovering the samples that are out there,” Nelson said.
The original plan called for NASA to land another vehicle on Mars and collect samples from Perseverance. The lander will launch from Mars and carry an ascent vehicle to carry samples into orbit. There, the material will be transferred to another spacecraft, the Mars rover built by the European Space Agency, which will be tasked with bringing the samples back to Earth.
At the conference, NASA officials called on the scientific community and industry to come up with new ideas for recovering samples using more existing, proven techniques and perhaps simpler processes.
“We’re looking at the possibility of a ready-to-use option that would allow us to return the samples sooner and at a lower cost,” Nicola “Nicky” Fox, NASA’s science chief, said at a briefing.
G. Scott Hubbard, the Stanford University professor who previously led NASA’s Mars program, said he was pleased with the “strong drumbeat of support” for the mission expressed by Fox and other officials at NASA’s town hall on Monday. He said in an email that he is. But he questioned whether the new architecture could reduce costs and speed up missions.
“[A] “It’s hard to imagine a magic wand solution that dramatically reduces cost and schedule without significantly increasing risk,” Hubbard said. “I’d be happy to be proven wrong.”
Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology and president of the Planetary Society, said NASA needs to find the willpower to finish the job Perseverance has already started.
“We are confident that we have the technical elements to put sample returns together. But when we choose to do something difficult, we must decide to do it and overcome the challenges together.” Yes, there is,” Ehrman said. “What we need is the leadership and the commitment to do it.”
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