Nasa recently asked the scientific community to help come up with innovative ideas for ways to carry out its Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. This was in response to a report by an independent board that deemed that its US$11 billion (£8.7 billion) price tag was too expensive and its 2040 timeline too far in the future.
In brief, the ambitious plan was to collect rock samples cached inside containers by Nasa’s Perseverance rover and deliver them to laboratories on Earth. Perseverance has been exploring Mars’ Jezero Crater, thought to have once hosted an ancient lake, since 2021. The mission would deliver the samples by sending a lander that carries a rocket (Nasa’s Sample Retrieval Lander) down to the surface of Mars.
Perseverance would then deliver the cached rock samples to the lander, with small drone helicopters delivered on the lander as a back up. Perseverance’s samples would then be launched into Mars’ orbit using the lander’s rocket. A spacecraft already in Martian orbit, the Earth Return Orbiter, would then intercept these samples and deliver them to Earth.
Seeing deadlines get pushed into the future isn’t new. It has happened with Nasa’s plans to return to the Moon and Europe’s ExoMars mission to find life on the red planet. While it is good to be realistic about timelines, the landscape of space exploration has changed over the last two decades, as organisations like Nasa experience large scale financial strain and........