Science | Space
It eliminates a European ‘rover’ and adds two helicopters to transfer the material to the rocket that will put it into orbit
The most ambitious Martian mission is simplified. NASA has redesigned the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, which will culminate in 2033 with the arrival of Martian dust and rocks in ground-based laboratories. The success of Perseverance and the Ingenuity helicopter, which landed on the planet on February 18 last year, has been key to a replanning of which the European Sample Collection Rover (SFR) falls and to which two drones are added .
The first phase of the MSR, a joint mission of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), is already underway in the Jezero crater, which hosted a lake 3.5 billion years ago. The Perseverance rover searches for traces of ancient microbial life , which has collected eleven tubes with soil and rock samples, and one with atmosphere. Until now, in a second phase, another ‘rover’, the SFR, was going to land on a platform with a rocket. That off-road vehicle, from ESA, would visit Perseverance, collect its samples and transfer them to the rocket. This would take them to Martian orbit, where it would release the container with them so that a European ship would hunt it down and bring it to Earth.
NASA has removed the European SUV from the equation. Instead of the SFR, the rocket pad will carry two helicopters to Mars based on Ingenuity’s design, which has already completed 29 flights and survived a year longer than expected. The US space agency trusts that Perseverance will be in charge of transporting the samples to the rocket, but, if it ‘died’ before, that task would be done by drones. The changes in the plan are “significant and advantageous” according to Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA Science, for whom the modifications “can be directly attributed to the recent successes of Perseverance in Jezero and the surprising performance of the helicopter.”
ESA is now working on the development of two key elements of the mission, the robot arm that will place the tubes with the samples in the container and the spacecraft that will catch it in orbit and bring it to Earth.
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