When NASA sent the Perseverance rover to Mars to collect samples, it bit off more than it could chew.
The $2.4 billion spacecraft landed in Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient lake. This is an ideal place to look for fossils of Martian microorganisms that may have existed at a time when Mars was rich in lakes and rivers.
Perseverance’s main mission is to collect rock and sediment samples along lake beds and crater rims in hopes of finding signs that life once thrived on the red planet. . The rover has done a great job, securing 24 samples so far, but NASA no longer knows how they will get the samples to Earth for analysis.
NASA’s original plans for a recovery mission called Mars Sample Return fell apart. The agency is asking companies to step in and come up with better ideas.
“We’re looking at readiness possibilities that allow us to return samples sooner and at a lower cost,” Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said at a press conference Monday. “This is definitely a very ambitious goal. We need to explore very innovative new possibilities for design, and we definitely need to leave no stone unturned.”
NASA’s old plan would cost $11 billion and take too long
David Parker, director of space exploration at the European Space Agency, said in 2021 that NASA’s original proposal for Mars sample return was “mind-bogglingly complex.”
The idea was to launch two rockets toward Mars, one carrying a lander and one carrying an orbiter.
This lander will be the largest ever sent to Mars. Perseverance would land near a sample cache and deploy the rover to retrieve sample tubes and load them into a small rocket attached to the lander.
The rocket will then launch the samples into Mars’ orbit, where they will be ejected into the Orbiter, the largest probe NASA has ever sent to Mars.
The orbiter must grab the sample, return to Earth, and drop the sample container in a violent dive to the Earth’s surface, where a team must retrieve the sample.
Mission planning relied on approximately $4 billion in new technology and 10 years of mission design and construction.
But since Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater, the projected cost has ballooned from $8 billion to $11 billion. An independent review concluded that it would take two years instead of 10 to bring the samples to Earth.
“Ultimately, $11 billion is too high, and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a briefing. “Astronauts will land on Mars in the decade of the 2040s.”
At current prices, Mars sample returns will “cannibalize” other NASA missions, Nelson said. Therefore, the agency is calling on everyone inside and outside of NASA to come up with a new plan.
NASA wants companies with ‘proven’ technology
Fox said NASA has until May 17 to review short proposals from companies and research institutes. NASA will then select a few of the competitors and spend 90 days developing their ideas further, with full proposals expected to be submitted to NASA’s desk by late fall or early fall. winter.
Some of NASA’s most established contractors include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and SpaceX. Start-ups like Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines are getting their foot in the door at NASA through the agency’s New Moon program.
“What we hope is that we can go back to a more traditional, proven architecture,” Fox said. “From experience, anything that requires a big leap in technology usually takes a lot of time.”
As for traveling from Mars to Earth and back, that would be a technological leap no matter how you look at it.
“We’ve never launched from another planet, and that’s actually what makes Mars Sample Return such a challenging and interesting mission, because it’s really the first time,” Fox said. Ta.