NASA has provided a long-awaited update on the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, and the news isn't good. Major changes are coming to the program, but we don't know quite what those changes are yet—no one does, which is the problem. NASA acknowledges the deficiencies cited in last year's independent review board report and says it will redesign the mission to deliver samples earlier and at a lower cost.
This mission will be one of the most complex the agency has ever undertaken, according to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. This has led to a bloated and poorly planned approach to getting the Mars samples to Earth. "The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, and a 2040 return date is too far away," said Nelson. The MSR is important, but NASA is unwilling to risk delays or cancelation of other expensive initiatives like the planned Dragonfly mission to Saturn's moon Titan.
The agency is now seeking "innovative designs" to get the program back on track. While people on Earth are puzzling over how to make MSR work, the Perseverance rover on Mars is still busily collecting samples and locking them up in tubes for future retrieval. It has even created a sample depot for the eventual MSR landing.
NASA initially hoped to spend just $8 billion on the sample return mission and launch years sooner, but there were too many unknowns when the mission was conceived. The MSR called for multiple launches featuring orbiters, landers, rovers, rockets, and even helicopters. Before the latest changes, NASA planned to launch a lander equipped with a rover to collect the samples. It later replaced that with two Ingenuity-style helicopters that would gather the sample tubes along with Perseverance itself. Then, the samples would be launched into orbit around Mars via a micro-rocket, where they could meet up with an ESA-provided return vehicle waiting in orbit.
While the old mission design was elaborate, there was nothing gratuitous about it. The sample tubes are on the Martian surface, so we have to go there, pick them up, get the samples back into orbit, and then return them to Earth unscathed. So, now NASA has to devise a cheaper, faster way to accomplish that, and it could be a year or more before we even learn what it's planning.
Nelson says the agency will take the rest of this year and next year to redesign the mission. It aims to use a mix of proven technology and innovative new ideas, the nature of which are currently unclear. NASA will solicit architecture proposals from private industry that could get the samples back to Earth in the 2030s. "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 of NASA's Science Mission Directorate.
