NASA is considering two strategies to bring valuable Mars samples back to Earth, but won’t announce a decision uil mid-2026.
According to RCO News Agency, Analysis of Mars samples collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover can provide a lot of data about the Red Planet and its history; including whether Mars has ever hosted life or not.
According to Spacey, NASA is eager to bring the Martian samples, which are about 30 sealed cigarette-sized tubes of rock and sedime, to Earth and then deliver them to laboratories around the world, but doing so has proven to be more difficult and much more expensive than originally thought.
For example, in July 2020 the maximum total cost of the Mars Sample Retrieval (MSR) project, a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency, was estimated at $3 billion, but just three years later, the expected cost was $8-11 billion. increased It is now clear that even with this cost, samples may not reach the ground before 2040.
NASA has recely evaluated this situation as unacceptable. In April 2024, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced that a fundameal review of the strategy for the Mars sample retrieval project is underway, noting that NASA will seek innovative ideas from research ceers, private industry, and universities.
A few mohs later, NASA selected 11 proposals from academic and industrial groups to further develop the project. Eight private groups received up to $1.5 million to coinue working on their ideas for the next 90 days.
This led to another milestone that NASA announced during a press conference yesterday afternoon, January 7th. The space agency is now focused on two poteial strategies for the Mars Sample Project, which differ in how they put the hardware on Mars.
The first strategy will employ a “sky crane” equipped with a rocket engine. This is the same system that successfully landed NASA’s Curiosity and Endurance rovers on Mars in August 2012 and February 2021, respectively. The second strategy will rely on private industry to provide the landing system.
Nelson said at the Jan. 7 meeting that working with the overhead crane would cost the project $6.6 billion to $7.7 billion. The commercial option, which NASA has not discussed in detail, citing concerns about proprietary technologies and designs, would be slightly cheaper, costing $5.8 billion to $7.1 billion.
Either option would provide a much simpler, faster and cheaper version of the original design, Nelson said.
Nelson noted that with the newly announced modifications, samples could be landed on Earth as early as 2035; Provided that the US Congress allocates sufficie funds to them. He added: Probably, about 300 million dollars are needed for the research and developme of the project of bringing samples to Mars in this financial year and in the coming years.
Both options would put the same hardware on the surface of Mars. The hardware is a lander that uses a small rocket called a Mars Asce Vehicle (MAV).
The lander will land near the Endurance rover. The lander will then pick up the sample tubes using a spare robotic arm developed for the Endurance rover mission and place them in a canister moued on the Mars Asce Vehicle. Apparely, in the new design, there is no place for a sample recovery helicopter like the Ingenuity helicopter. This possibility existed in previous designs.
Next, the rocket will send the samples io Mars orbit, where they will rendezvous with an ESA spacecraft that will bring them back to Earth.
Either way, the Mars asce vehicle and lander will have less mass than originally thought, allowing for the possible use of a sky crane. The basic concept of the Mars Asce Vehicle was too large for a sky crane and required a new and unproven landing system. Even with the new revision, the sky crane would have to be about 20 perce larger than the crane that landed the Endurance, NASA officials said at a press conference.
The lander will use a nuclear power source—the radioisotope thermoelectric generator used by Curiosity and Endurance—instead of solar panels. “Jeff Gramling” (Jeff Gramling), manager of NASA’s Mars sampler program, believes that the radioisotope thermoelectric generator has two major advaages.
“The first advaage is that the radioisotope thermoelectric generator gives us the opportunity to operate during the dust storm season,” Gramling said at the press conference. The surface operations timeline is one of the main drivers to make sure we have enough time to move the 30 pipes. The second benefit is that it helps us make sure we can keep the solid rocket motors moued on the Mars Asce Vehicle warm.
NASA is considering both landing options and doesn’t expect to make a decision uil mid-2026. “Nicky Fox” (Nicky Fox), head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said: With this schedule, it is not possible to launch the European orbiter earlier than 2030 and the lander earlier than 2031.
Thus, the endurance samples may not be the first pristine Martian material to reach Earth. China plans to begin its mission to bring samples to Mars in 2028, and if all goes well, it could bring the samples home in 2031, but the Chinese mission will collect material from a region of Mars. Meanwhile, Endurance will obtain samples from a wide variety of environmes that were exposed to liquid water in Mars’ ancie past.
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