NASA’s Rover Perseverance has given us one of the most exciting news of recent years. In an old river bed in the Jezero crater, he has found a rock that could contain, In the words of NASA directorone of the “clearest signs of life we have seen on Mars.” Baptized as Cheyava Falls, the rock has dark deposits whose chemical, mineral and textural characteristics, on earth, are associated with microbial life. But scientists cannot be safe from here. Unless…
Mars Sample Return. Perseverance did his job: in July of last year he identified a place of very high scientific interest, analyzed the rock with its instruments and, most importantly, pierced a core of the rock and kept it in a sealed sampling tube. This little treasure, along with 29 other sampling tubes, waits patiently on the Martian surface.
The problem is that, however advanced the instruments of the rover are, they have their limits. To confirm if those possible “biofirmas” are the product of old microorganisms or geochemical processes without biological intervention, there is only one solution: bringing samples to the earth to analyze them in our laboratories. And this is where The plans collide with a hard reality. The plan to collect these samples, the ambitious Mars Sample Return mission, has been de facto canceled waiting for a cheaper and faster solution.
Truncated due to lack of budget. NASA’s original plan to collect the 30 samples of the Perseverance Rover was to send a ship to the surface of Mars, that a small rocket would take off with the samples (delivered by Rover itself or by a drone) and that an orbiter (in this case, contributed by the European Space Agency) to bring them back home.
The project ended up becoming a bottomless well. According to an external audit, the budget shot up to 11,000 million dollars with an estimated date for 2040. The situation reached such an extent that the US administration He proposed to cancel Mars Sample Return for his excessive budgetprioritizing other programs such as Artemis to return to the moon. NASA was forced to put the project in pause and look for faster and more cheap alternatives.
A career to counterreloj. Time runs against NASA. Not only for the potential historical value of these samples, but because China plans to launch its own sampling mission in 2028. Tianwen-3 is a simpler mission, which would not bring selected rocks but from the ground where the probe landed, but that would return to Earth in 2031. It would be a Sorpasso symbolic in full rule, advancing the United States in a milestone that had at hand.
Before the collapse of its official plan and the probable symbolic defeat, NASA did what has been best given in recent years: to look at the private sector. The agency Explore two paths simultaneously: one based on public technology already tested, such as the “Sky Crane” landing system of Curiosity and Perseverance, and another open to “new commercial capabilities.”
Voluntary companies. They haven’t taken to appear. Lockheed Martin has put on the table a groundbreaking proposal: executing the mission For less than 3,000 million dollars and under a fixed price contract, which means that it would assume any extra cost. Your plan is based on reusing and adapting technology already tested in missions such as Insight and Osiris-Rexwith a simpler and more light architecture than the original Mars Sample Return.
Another of the great candidates is Rocket Lab, a company that, despite its youth, also has experience on the red planet: its components travel aboard Perseverance and other missions. Your proposal is to send a probe to collect the samples and send them to the Martian orbit and a second probe to bring them to the earth, with a third probe called Telecommunications Orbiter for Mars (MTO) that not only would support the mission, but would serve as a basis for future manned missions, establishing a robust communications network between Mars and the land that Rocket Lab could exploit commercially for decades.
And Spacex? NASA It does not rule out using starship as a vehicle to bring to the Martian surface all the necessary equipment. If Elon Musk fulfills its ambitious deadlines, Starship could offer an unprecedented load capacity to an unbeatable cost.
The final decision on which path is expected for the second half of 2026. What is clear is that NASA is at a crossroads. The samples collected by Perseverance have the potential to confirm that on Mars there was extraterrestrial life. But to find the answer, you must first bring them home. And the solution may not be in a public program, but in companies that have offered to do the job for less than half.
Image | Rocket Lab
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