The US wants to give up bringing the most valuable samples collected on Mars. Lockheed promises to do it for less than half

Since February 2021, The Rover Perseverance patiently travels the Jezero crateran old river basin on the surface of Mars. Over there, where millions of years ago the water flowedNASA Robot It has been collecting fragments of rock and Martian dust With a very specific objective: Find signs of past life. It is not any mission. Is, According to NASA itselfthe first step of an ambitious plan to bring intact samples from another planet.

For more than three years, Perseverance has done his job in silence and the samples that Now rest inside of small sealed tubes, carefully deposited on the Martian surface or stored aboard the Rover itself. From space, bread crumbs would look like a trace drawn through a desert planet, hoping to be collected.

A truncated promise

The plan, known as Mars Sample ReturnI had to send another ship to Mars, launch from there a rocket with the samples and return them to the Earth for analysis in laboratories. But the project began to crumble. An independent review raised the cost estimated until 11,000 million dollars and delayed the possible return of the samples until 2040.

In May, the new US administration presented its first budget draft: proposes to cut 24 % of NASA’s financing and cancel Mars Sample Return for considering it an exorbitant cost program. The plan must still go through Congress, but marks a clear turn: the menions manned to deep space are prioritized, such as Artemisand the projects with great budget and scarce immediate return are frozen.

With the current budget cut and without guarantees of continuity, NASA decided to reexamine its options. As explained by the former administrator Bill Nelsontwo more viable alternative routes were being evaluated: one that takes advantage of the “Sky Crane” type landing system used successfully in the Curiosity and Perseverance Rovers, and another that opens the door to new proposals from the private sector.

Lockheed Martin’s letter

Amid the budget uncertainty, one of the great space contractors in the United States has decided to move file. Lockheed Martin, with half a century of experience in missions to Mars, has presented NASA a proposal to execute the Mars Return mission with a radically different approach: for less than 3,000 million dollars and under a fixed price contract.

The change is not less. Faced with the traditional model, full of budgetary risks and with multiple public actors involved, Lockheed promises a simpler architecture. Its proposal includes a more compact landing module, based on the ship Insight that already touched Martiano soil in 2018a lighter and lighter ascent vehicle – designed to be the first to take off from another planet – and a system of re -entry to the land derived from missions such as Genesis, Stardust and Osiris-Rex.

It is a commitment goes beyond engineering. Being a “Firm-Fixed Price” contract, Lockheed Martin is responsible for absorb any possible extra cost. That is, if something is complicated, the invoice does not rise. According to the company itself, that model has already proven effective in other scientific missions of deep space, where they even managed to return part of the NASA not used budget.

The message is clear: if NASA wants to save its most ambitious mission without spending, Lockheed Martin is ready to lead it. Bringing back about thirty small tubes could help us answer one of humanity’s great questions. Was Mars ever inhabited?

Scientists do not seek fossils or complex structures. They look for subtle indications that can only be analyzed with the level of precision allowed by land laboratories. And for that, the samples that Perseverance has collected are not any rock. They have been selected one by one depending on their location, their age, their composition and their geological context. Are, In Nasa’s own wordsthe most likely material to contain a Martian “biofirm.”

But the value of these samples goes beyond the biological. They can reveal how the wet marte of 3.5 billion years ago was, how its climate evolved, why it became an arid and inhospitable planet, and how the geological, atmospheric and chemical processes interacted for millennia. They will also tell us what resources could take advantage of future manned missions: where it is safer to land, what materials are usable, what areas have risks.

Images | Lockheed Martin

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