NASA Collected Mars Rocks to Haul to Earth. It still Doesn’t Know How.

The Washington Post / Joel Achenbach

16:08 JST, January 8, 2025

For more than a year, scientists and aerospace engineers have been awaiting NASA’s decision on how to rescue the troubled Mars Sample Return mission, which aspires to bring Martian rocks and soil to Earth but was halted amid dismay over the project’s cost and glacial timeline. It’s NASA’s most ambitious planetary science mission, a deep scouring of the history of Mars, and it conceivably could make the ultimate scientific breakthrough, detecting the first evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Finally, after months of pondering how to get samples to Earth faster and more quickly, NASA on Tuesday announced its decision – which is to keep its options open. The agency said it has decided to study two distinct strategic paths, one using traditional NASA techniques and other leveraging the jumbo rockets being developed by commercial space companies.

The tried-and-true path would rely on the much-heralded “sky crane” technique that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory employed to drop two rovers on Mars. The private industry option is less clear: NASA continues to mull a raft of proposals from the commercial sector and has not tipped its hand on which one it might favor.

“Either of these two options are creating a much more simplified, faster and less expensive version of the original plan,” NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a teleconference with reporters.

He said the only “responsible” thing to do is to give the incoming administration more than one option for Mars Sample Return.

But the decision to defer a final decision on the mission architecture keeps Mars Sample Return in limbo.

“Yet more studies and no firm decision,” Casey Dreier, head of space policy for the Planetary Society, an advocacy group, said in an email after the announcement. “NASA needs to commit – or not – for [the mission] to return samples anytime soon.”

Given that the Perseverance rover has already obtained 28 samples of rock, soil and atmosphere on Mars in cigar-sized titanium tubes, and given the decades-long desire of the scientific community to study those samples in laboratories, the mission is arguably close to too-big-to-fail status. But so far it’s been too hard to pull off, at least under a budget and timeline acceptable to Congress and NASA leaders.

An independent review in 2023 found that the program could cost between $8 billion and $11 billion – many times the original projected budget – and might not succeed in getting the samples back before 2040. NASA soon halted work on the project and started figuring out how to simplify the mission.

“We pulled the plug,” Nelson said Tuesday. “This thing had gotten out of control.”

Planetary scientists have ranked the Mars Sample Return mission as their highest priority. The geological narrative of the Red Planet is etched in the rocks and soil. Scientists want to get that material to Earth where it can be examined with technologies that can’t be shoehorned into the payload of a Mars probe. And those samples, just like the moon rocks gathered by Apollo astronauts, could be studied in decades to come with technologies not yet invented.

Robotic exploration of Mars has shown that it was warm and wet billions of years ago, seemingly with the raw ingredients for life as we know it. Today it is a forlorn, dusty desert world, almost airless, without a sign of life. But it may have once been a blue world like Earth.

“Bringing [samples] back will revolutionize our understanding of Mars and indeed our place in the solar system,” NASA’s top science administrator, Nicola “Nicky” Fox, told reporters Tuesday.

Life on Mars has been the subject of cultural (“The War of the Worlds,” etc.) and scientific speculation since at least the 19th century, and well into the 20th century scientists wondered if changes on the surface seen through telescopes could be associated with plant life. After NASA’s Viking mission in 1976 failed to find persuasive evidence of life, Mars lost some of its luster. Then in 1996 the sensational claim that a Mars meteorite found in Antarctica contained ancient microfossils – an assertion viewed askance by many scientists but never definitively debunked – pumped new interest in Mars exploration. What followed was a series of NASA missions, including orbiters and five rovers.

Advocates for the sample return mission say it would support aspirations for human landings on Mars in the not-distant future. Martian rock and soil samples would “tell us about risks to astronauts, such as whether there are chemicals in the soil or dust that could be hazardous to people,” Bruce Jakosky, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado and Mars expert, said in an email Monday. Moreover, he said, “They allow us to continue setting up the science questions that will be addressed by human missions.”

Last year the agency asked the private sector, as well as the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, to present proposals for a new way to get the samples to Earth. Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Blue Origin (owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post), Quantum Space, Northrop Grumman, Whittinghill Aerospace and Rocket Lab were selected by NASA to present ideas.

The travails of the sample return mission come amid the rise of the commercial space industry, an evolutionary change spurred significantly by NASA’s decision to award multi-billion-dollar commercial contracts. For the past decade and a half the agency has been gradually shedding its reliance on government-owned, government-operated rockets and spacecraft. Instead, NASA is a customer of the private companies, buying tickets on commercial spacecraft.

The original NASA sample return plan required a remarkable fleet of spaceships. First, Perseverance would land on Mars and, while exploring Jezero Crater, collect samples. (Perseverance is technically a stand-alone mission, and is not formally part of the Mars Sample Return mission.) Then two more spacecraft would travel to the surface of Mars. One would dispatch a rover to pick up the samples. The other, an ascent vehicle, would blast them back into space, to Mars orbit.

That initial plan was later revised to include just one lander, with Perseverance charged with handing off the samples. The ascent vehicle would be stacked onto the lander.

The ascent vehicle would meet up with yet another spacecraft in Mars orbit, one built by the European Space Agency, NASA’s partner in the mission. That orbiting vehicle would rocket the samples back to Earth.

Nelson and Fox on Tuesday revealed some elements of a simpler mission design. The lander wouldn’t be as heavy. A radioisotope thermoelectric generator would provide power rather than an large array of solar panels.

Nelson said the paths under consideration would bring the samples to Earth sometime between 2035 and 2039. The sky crane option would cost between $6.6 billion and $7.7 billion, and the commercial option would be in the range of $5.8 billion to $7.1 billion, Nelson said.

“That’s a far cry from $11 billion,” he said.