NASA has just two Mars Sample Return mission lander options left
- Reference: 1736356018
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/01/08/nasa_whittles_down_mars_sample/
- Source link:
During a [1]briefing on January 7, the US space agency confirmed it had whittled down the options to two: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which would employ the sky crane technology - used to land the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars - to deposit a lander on the surface of the red planet; the other would use a commercial vendor to get the lander to Mars.
NASA's FY2025 budget request means tough times ahead for Chandra and Hubble [2]READ MORE
The lander itself would feature a small rocket, the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), which would take the samples to a spacecraft provided by the European Space Agency (ESA) for a trip back to Earth.
The plan relies on the Perseverance trundlebot being able to make it to the lander, and a spare arm developed as part of the Perseverance mission and fitted to the lander taking the samples from the rover and loading them into the MAV.
The price given for the JPL option was between $6.6 billion and $7.7 billion, while the commercial providers came in between $5.8 billion and $7.1 billion. NASA did not go into detail on what the commercial vendors suggested, citing proprietary information, but did note that as well as heavy landers, an architecture along the lines of JPL's sky crane had also been proposed.
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NASA noted that it would not be a straightforward reuse of the sky crane technology – the system would need to be 20 percent bigger than the one used to land the rovers.
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Some decisions have, however, been made. The lander won't include solar panels but will instead use a radioisotope thermal generator (RTG) for power, meaning it would be better able to handle dust storms and keep the solid rocket motors on the MAV warm.
The estimated budget for the Mars Sample Return mission ballooned to $11 billion during 2024, and that, coupled with a return date of 2040 for samples from Mars, [6]resulted in a call to find an alternative approach with a price tag in the range of $5 billion to $7 billion.
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The revised plan ditches the idea of an Ingenuity-type helicopter to retrieve the samples – Perseverance will have to make it to the lander – and brings forward the return date to as soon as 2035. However, that might slip to 2039 if funding doesn't materialize in a timely manner.
Either date will still put the US behind China, which is planning its own Mars sample return expedition in the form of Tianwen-3, due to launch in 2028. NASA administrator Bill Nelson was dismissive of the Chinese approach and described it as a "grab and go kind of mission" compared to the methodical approach taken by the Perseverance team, where samples were taken from a variety of locations.
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Nelson might be correct from a scientific point of view, but the optics of the US not being the first to retrieve a Mars sample might not play well with the incoming US administration, who will need to sign off on the approach. ®
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[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/Y6-hE6Sadzs
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/12/nasas_fy2025_budget_request_means/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Z38DktFJjItPH3TcefAOCAAAAM0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/16/nasa_msr_mission_update/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/13/nasas_jet_propulsion_laboratory_layoffs/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/12/trump_space_program/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/16/nasa_msr_mission_update/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/23/ingenuity_pushes_the_envelope/
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/science&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z38DktFJjItPH3TcefAOCAAAAM0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
But the return trip is required for it to be a sample return mission ........ at least for the samples!
I suppose excess organic material could be left behind to make the return trip lighter!
Why just Elon? Make Mars a new penal colony, and send the worst felons from Earth up there. The first convict seat is obviously taken.
"Why just Elon? Make Mars a new penal colony" ... I think that comment should have used the Joke Alert icon.
But when you see the difficulty we have to just visit the nearest planet, then it's clear that we need to discover how to visit every planet and even the nearest other solar systems. We've got plenty of time to work on this, the Sun should keep working for another 5 billion years hopefully - but eventually we might need to move to a new system ... we're lucky to have plenty of time to become our aliens.
Slippage
*If* I'm reading this right from on here and other sources, the sample return mission has already ended up descoped, massively behind schedule, massively expanded in cost and reliant on the wild hope that a complex piece of equipment will still be working over a decade after the original intended return mission date for a plan that originally didn't rely on it still working? (i.e using a retrieval rover landing in 2029)
It all looks like it has moved from a real plan (in terms of schedule/cost/methods) into the realm of something that won't happen but no one is willing to admit that so they keep their planning meetings going anyway.
The departure from reality is emphasised by how the budget for this bit has ballooned vs the low cost of the mission it's meant to be piggybacking off.
Simple really...
...attach big rocket motors to Mars and send it on a collision course with Earth. We'll have more Mars samples than we know what to do with.
Of course the rocket would have to be quite large but given his Muskness's ambitions seem to be limited only by the size of his ego there is no problem there.
Maybe we should cooperate with China
And instead of or along with returning their samples from a limited set of locations return our samples from a wider range of locations and we share the data. If the US and USSR managed to work together during the cold war, surely the US and China can work together on something like this.
Why didn't they design the original mission with the sample return included? Was it a budgetary matter - NASA was only allocated enough money to do the rover/copter but not the sample return? Or they didn't want to include the capability of sample return and have it be wasted if the rover's skyhook landing had failed? Seems crazy to leave it until now and still don't even know HOW it will be returned let alone who will build it.
Send Elon up in Starship with a Spade. Return trip wholly optional.