The yr 2025 is not even every week outdated and NASA is already gearing up for its first large announcement, this one concerning the company’s formidable, but beleaguered, Mars pattern return mission.
On Tuesday (Jan. 7), NASA’s high brass will maintain an audio-only press convention to replace the general public on its Mars pattern return program. The media briefing will start at 1:00 p.m. EST (1800 GMT), and you can pay attention in on-line through NASA’s web site.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and Nicky Fox, the company’s affiliate administrator for science missions, will host the Mars exploration briefing. “The briefing will embody NASA’s efforts to finish its targets of returning scientifically chosen samples from Mars to Earth whereas decreasing price, threat and mission complexity,” NASA officers wrote in a Jan. 3 assertion.
NASA’s Mars Sample Return program is designed to do exactly what its identify suggests: return items of Mars to Earth so scientists can examine the Red Planet up shut. To that finish, NASA’s Perseverance rover on Mars has already collected and cached a bevy of samples because it arrived on the planet in 2021.
“The company’s Mars Sample Return Program has been a significant long-term purpose of worldwide planetary exploration for greater than 20 years,” NASA wrote within the assertion. “NASA’s Perseverance rover is amassing compelling science samples that can assist scientists perceive the geological historical past of Mars, the evolution of its local weather, and put together for future human explorers. The return of the samples additionally will assist NASA’s seek for indicators of historical life.”
But the mission to return these Perseverance Mars rover samples to Earth is at a crossroads.
One plan to return Perseverance’s samples to Earth referred to as for a lander to the touch down close to the rover, use a classy robotic arm (or maybe robotic drones like NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helictoper) to gather the samples from Perserverance and retailer them in a rocket that may then launch into orbit. Another spacecraft, offered by the European Space Agency, would then accumulate the pattern capsule for the journey to Earth.
In 2020, the estimated price of that Mars pattern return plan maxed out at round $3 billion. By April 2024, the mission’s complexity and technical challenges have been clearer, and its price ticket rose to an estimated $11 billion at its excessive finish. An evaluation in September 2023 additionally discovered extra dangerous information: Because of the difficult structure of the plan, NASA would probably not be capable of return Perseverance’s samples to Earth till 2040, a full 20 years after the rover first launched to Mars.
“The backside line is that $11 billion is simply too costly, and never returning samples till 2040 is unacceptably too lengthy,” Nelson mentioned of that discovering throughout an April 2024 media name.
China, for instance, plans to launch its personal pattern return mission to Mars in 2028 with the purpose of returning these samples to Earth in 2031. So, NASA is not alone in its race to gather samples of Mars.
Throughout 2024, NASA has labored to revamp its Mars pattern return plan right into a situation that would cut back its price and complexity. Tuesday’s media briefing could reveal among the new considering that would go into that plan.
Last month, Nelson instructed reporters at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center that the brand new Mars pattern return plan will embody extra than simply NASA facilities.
“What’s popping out is by involving trade, and never NASA facilities like [the Jet Propulsion Laboratory], combining with others, they’re popping out with far more sensible (proposals), the place they will pace up the time and significantly decrease the fee,” Spaceflight Now quoted Nelson as saying through the Dec. 18 assembly.
