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The year 2025 has yet to reach its first week, yet NASA is already preparing for its initial major announcement, which pertains to the agency’s ambitious and somewhat troubled Mars sample return mission.
On Tuesday (Jan. 7), top NASA officials will conduct an audio-only press conference to inform the public about the Mars sample return program. The media briefing is set to commence at 1:00 p.m. EST (1800 GMT), and you can listen in online via NASA’s website.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Nicky Fox, the agency’s associate administrator for science missions, will lead the Mars exploration briefing. “The briefing will encompass NASA’s endeavors to fulfill its objectives of returning scientifically selected specimens from Mars to Earth while reducing costs, risks, and mission intricacies,” NASA officials stated in a Jan. 3 announcement.
NASA’s Mars Sample Return program aims to do precisely what its title indicates: bring fragments of Mars back to Earth so researchers can examine the Red Planet closely. Consequently, NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars has already gathered and stored a variety of samples since its arrival on the planet in 2021.
“The agency’s Mars Sample Return Program has been a significant long-term aim of international planetary exploration for over twenty years,” NASA noted in the statement. “NASA’s Perseverance rover is gathering notable scientific specimens that will assist researchers in understanding the geological history of Mars, its climatic evolution, and prepare for upcoming human explorers. The return of these samples will also aid NASA’s quest for signs of ancient life.”
However, the mission to retrieve the Perseverance Mars rover samples back to Earth is at a pivotal moment.
One strategy to return Perseverance’s specimens involved a lander landing near the rover, utilizing an advanced robotic arm (or potentially robotic drones similar to NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter) to gather the samples from Perseverance and store them in a rocket that would subsequently launch into orbit. Another spacecraft, supplied by the European Space Agency, would then retrieve the sample capsule for the journey to Earth.
In 2020, the projected cost for that Mars sample return initiative reached approximately $3 billion. By April 2024, the mission’s complexity and technical difficulties became apparent, resulting in its estimated cost escalating to around $11 billion at its highest estimation. An evaluation conducted in September 2023 revealed more unfavorable news: Due to the intricate structure of the plan, NASA likely would not be able to return Perseverance’s specimens to Earth until 2040, a full 20 years after the rover’s initial launch to Mars.
“The key takeaway is that $11 billion is excessively costly, and not retrieving samples until 2040 is unacceptably prolonged,” Nelson remarked regarding that assessment during an April 2024 media call.
For instance, China intends to initiate its own sample return mission to Mars in 2028, aiming to bring those samples back to Earth by 2031. Therefore, NASA is not solitary in its pursuit to acquire samples from Mars.
Throughout 2024, NASA has been working to revise its Mars sample return strategy into a scenario that would diminish its cost and intricacy. The media briefing on Tuesday may unveil some of the fresh perspectives that could be integrated into that plan.
Last month, Nelson informed journalists at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center that the updated Mars sample return strategy would involve more than just NASA centers.
“The emerging approach involves engaging industry and not solely NASA centers like [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory], collaborating with others to devise far more feasible (proposals) that can expedite the timeline and significantly reduce the cost,” Spaceflight Now quoted Nelson as stating during the meeting on Dec. 18.
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