A critical NASA mission in the search for life beyond Earth, Sample return from Mars, is in trouble. That’s it the budget soared from $5 billion to more than $11 billion, and the sample return date could be pushed back from the end of this decade to 2040.
The mission would be the first to attempt to return rock samples from Mars to Earth so scientists can analyze them for signs of past life.
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a press conference on April 15, 2024, that the mission as currently conceived is too expensive and too slow. NASA gave private companies a month to submit proposals to bring the samples back in a faster and more affordable way.
As a astronomer who studies cosmology and wrote a book about first missions to Mars, I’ve been watching the sample return saga unfold. Mars is the closest and best place to look for life outside of Earth, and if this ambitious NASA mission falls apart, scientists will miss the opportunity to learn much more about the red planet.
The habitability of Mars
The first NASA missions reaching the surface of Mars in 1976 revealed that the planet was an icy desert, uninhabitable without a thick atmosphere to protect life from the Sun’s ultraviolet radiation. But studies over the past decade suggest that the planet may have been much hotter and humid several billion years ago.
O Curiosity It is Perseverance each rover showed that the planet’s early environment was suitable for microbial life.
They found the chemical building blocks of life and signs of surface waters in the distant past. Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, is still active; its twin, Perseverance, that landed on Mars in 2021will play a crucial role in the sample return mission.
Why astronomers want samples from Mars
The first time NASA looked for life in a rock on Mars was in 1996. Scientists claimed to have discovered microscopic fossils of bacteria in the Martian meteorite ALH84001. This meteorite is a piece of Mars that landed in Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984. Scientists have disagreed about whether the meteorite actually ever harbored biology, and Today most scientists agree that there is not enough evidence to say that the rock contains fossils.
Several hundred Martian meteorites have been found on Earth in the last 40 years. These are free samples that fell to Earth, so although it may seem intuitive to study them, scientists can’t tell where these meteorites originated on Mars. Furthermore, they were ripped from the planet’s surface by impacts, and these violent events could easily have destroyed or altered subtle evidence of life in the rock.
There is no substitute for bringing back samples from a region known to have been hospitable to life in the past. As a result, the agency faces a price tag of $700 million per ounce, making these samples the most expensive material already gathered.
A compelling and complex mission
Bringing rocks from Mars back to Earth is the most challenging mission NASA has ever attempted, and the first step has already begun.
Perseverance collected more than two dozen rock and soil samples, depositing them at the bottom of Jezero Crater, a region that was probably once flooded with water and could have supported life. The rover inserts the samples into test tube-sized containers. Once the rover fills all the sample tubes, it will gather them and take them to the location where the NASA mission is located. Sample Recovery Lander will land. The Sample Retrieval Lander includes a rocket to place samples into orbit around Mars.
The European Space Agency has designed a Earth Return Orbiter, which will rendezvous with the rocket in orbit and capture the basketball-sized sample container. The samples will then be automatically sealed in a biocontainment system and transferred to an Earth entry capsule, which is part of the Earth Return Orbiter. After the long journey home, the entry capsule will parachute to the Earth’s surface.
The complex choreography of this mission, which involves a rover, a lander, a rocket, an orbiter and the coordination of two space agencies, is unprecedented. It is the culprit behind the growing budget and long term.
Returning Samples Breaks the Bank
Mars Sample Return has opened a hole in NASA’s budget, which threatens other missions that need funding.
The NASA center behind the mission, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just laid off more than 500 employees. It’s likely that the Mars Sample Return budget partially caused the layoffs, but they also arrived at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with an overcrowded slate of planetary missions and grief. budget cuts.
Last year, a independent review board report and a report from the NASA Office of Inspector General created deep concerns on the feasibility of the sample return mission. These reports described the mission’s design as overly complex and noted issues such as inflation, supply chain problems, and unrealistic cost and schedule estimates.
NASA is also feeling the heat of Congress. For fiscal year 2024, the Senate Appropriations Committee reduced NASA’s planetary science budget by more than half a billion dollars. If NASA cannot control costs, the mission could even be canceled.
Think outside the box
Faced with these challenges, NASA made a call for innovative private industry projects, with the aim of reducing the cost and complexity of the mission. Design studies are scheduled for May 17, an extremely tight deadline for such a challenging design effort. And it will be difficult for private companies to improve on the plan that experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have had more than a decade to come up with.
An important potential player in this situation is the commercial space company SpaceX. NASA is already partnership with SpaceX on America’s return to the Moon. Artemis III MissionSpaceX will attempt to land humans on the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.
However, the massive Starship rocket that SpaceX will use for Artemis has only had three test flights and needs much more development before NASA entrusts it with a human payload.
In principle, a Starship rocket could bring back a large load of rocks from Mars in a single two-year mission and at a much lower cost. But Starship comes with great risks and uncertainties. It’s unclear whether this rocket could return the samples Perseverance has already collected.
The starship uses a launching pad, and would need to be refueled for a return trip. But there is no launch pad or fueling station in Jezero Crater. Starship was designed to carry people, but if astronauts are going to Mars to collect samples, SpaceX will need a Starship rocket that is even bigger than the one you have tested so far.
Sending astronauts also carries additional risks and costs, and a people strategy could end up more complicated than NASA’s current plan.
With all these pressures and restrictions, NASA chose to see if the private sector can find a winning solution. We will know the answer next month.
This article has been updated to reflect that design studies, not proposals, for the sample return mission are scheduled for May 17, 2024.
This article was republished from The conversation, an independent, nonprofit news organization that brings you trusted facts and analysis to help you understand our complex world. It was written by: Chris Impey, University of Arizona
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Chris Impey receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
