NASA needs help fetching rocks from Mars, and on Tuesday, agency officials announced that they have not yet quite decided how to do that. Instead, they are leaving a final decision to the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.
But the officials said they had figured out how to potentially launch the mission and bring those red planet rocks back to Earth sooner by reducing the size and weight of the mission, known as Mars Sample Return. Cost estimates last year had risen to as much as $11 billion. With the revisions, Mars Sample Return is still expensive, but would be less than $8 billion.
“That’s a far cry from $11 billion,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said Tuesday.
Bringing Martian rock and soil samples to Earth is among the top priorities of planetary scientists. While spacecraft in orbit and rovers on the surface of Mars have discovered plenty, their capabilities are limited. By studying fresh rocks up close with the latest, most powerful instruments in their laboratories, scientists could unravel mysteries of the red planet’s past, including possibly whether life ever arose there.
The first phase of Mars Sample Return is already underway. NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2021, has been drilling and collecting cylindrical samples of rock and soil in Jezero Crater.
The rest of the plan, devised by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, requires a complex choreography. First, a new robotic spacecraft would land near Perseverance, which would then hand over about 30 of its rock samples to launch into orbit around Mars. Yet another spacecraft, from the European Space Agency, would retrieve those samples, take them back to Earth and drop them off within a small disk-shaped vehicle that would land in a Utah desert.
That plan remains essentially the same, but the key to the change was realizing that the rocket to launch the samples from the surface of Mars into orbit around the planet did not need to be as big and heavy as the initial design.
Nelson, who will step down as NASA administrator with the change of presidents later this month, said NASA officials under Trump’s administration would most likely be able to make a decision sometime next year.
However, he also said that to keep the program from being further delayed, it would need Congress to provide at least $300 million this year.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
