NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has unveiled the agency’s plans to seek new methods of retrieving Mars samples being collected by the Perseverance rover to support future space exploration missions.
“Safely landing and collecting the samples, launching a rocket with the samples off another planet – which has never been done before – and safely transporting the samples more than 33 million miles back to Earth is no small task,” the 2024 Wash100 awardee said.
“We need to look outside the box to find a way ahead that is both affordable and returns samples in a reasonable timeframe,” he added.
NASA plans to solicit architecture proposals from industry to devise a new plan for the Mars Sample Return program that could retrieve samples by 2030.
A September 2023 report from the Mars Sample Return Independent Review Board recommended that NASA develop an updated mission design that lowers mission complexity and ensure that the mission has an overall budget between $8 billion and $11 billion.
