When the Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February 2021, its tasks included collecting samples that a future NASA mission together with the European Space Agency (ESA) should recover years later. That project was named Mars Sample Return (MSR). However, less than five years later, those responsible have realized that this idea is more complicated than they thought. So NASA is once again considering a plan that has worked well in recent years: leaving the initiative in the hands of private companies.
Before the launch of Perseverance in 2020, it was estimated that the project could cost, at most, $3 billion. However, in April of last year, NASA acknowledged that the budget had skyrocketed to more than $11 billion. A more than delicate situation for the mission, even more so if it was taken into account that an evaluation report indicated that, due to the complexity of the objectives, the remains collected on Mars could not be rescued until at least 2040, a decade later than expected. initially planned.
That is why last April Bill Nelson, NASA administrator, gave a press conference assessing the outlook for the mission and announced that other alternatives had to be considered. And now comes the time to make decisions. «That the cost of returning the samples increased to 11 billion dollars and the samples return in 2040 is unacceptable. So we have put that plan aside,” Nelson said in the online press conference. “NASA is looking for new designs to make MSR at a lower cost and return in the 2030s. They are looking for lower risk and lower complexity of the mission.”
For this reason, the still administrator of NASA (he will soon be relieved by Jared Isaacman, the magnate and promoter of private space travel with SpaceX appointed by President-elect Donald Trump), has announced that the agency has decided to simplify the project and that it is considering two options: on the one hand, use an aerial crane (Skycrane), as was done with the landings of Perseverance or Curiosity, but used in reverse, and that would transport the material to the spacecraft that will build the THAT; or, on the other hand, rely on old business partners such as SpaceX (Elon Musk’s space company and NASA’s main contractor) or Blue Space – both have already expressed interest in the project – to build a lander. The original plan involved not only a lander, but also an ascent vehicle, a sample transfer arm, and two Ingenuity-like helicopters. All of that, for now at least, seems to have to wait.
Perseverance has 43 tubes in which it can store samples and of which it has around thirty complete from the Jezero crater and its surroundings, a place where everything indicates that more than 3.5 billion years ago, the river channels were They overflowed the crater wall and created a lake. That is where the rover is looking for signs of past Martian life, finding quite promising samples (some in particular with marks that could suggest past microbial life) of which more details cannot be found out in situ due to the limitation of the rover’s instruments.
Mars, new battlefield between the US and China
In December, Nelson already gave clues about the possible future of the mission. “What is emerging is that by involving the industry (private companies), and not just NASA centers, much more practical proposals are being reached, where they can speed up the time and considerably reduce the cost,” he noted. Nelson.
Now this update highlights the tightrope in which the project remains, which would cost between 6,600 and 7,700 million dollars in the case of using the aerial crane; or between 5,800 and 7,200 million dollars if the private option is chosen. “The direct return could be as early as 2035, perhaps 2039,” said Nelson, although the mission must obtain $300 million in initial funding this year, as revealed by the NASA administrator. However, launch of the missions will not occur until at least 2030 for the Earth return orbiter and 2031 for the sample return lander.
This decision is made in a context of a new space race and Mars as one of the juiciest battlefields – along with the Moon. Because the Red Planet is no longer the fiefdom of the United States and other countries are pushing hard to also become a reference in the exploration of our neighbor. Currently, ten robotic missions are exploring the surface and atmosphere of Mars, including seven orbiters, two rovers and one helicopter.
Among them, the main competition for the US is China which, apart from creating its own space station, landing on the moon for the first time in history on the far side of the Moon and bringing remains to Earth, in addition to being the second country that lands a rover on the Red Planet, has already announced that it plans to launch its own sample return mission to Mars in 2028 with the goal of bringing them back to our planet in 2031, ahead of NASA’s plan. The race to recover Martian rocks has undoubtedly begun.
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