This illustration shows a concept for multiple robots that would team up to ferry to Earth samples of rocks and soil being collected from the Martian surface by NASAs Mars Perseverance rover.
NASA and ESA (European Space Agency) are developing concepts for the Mars Sample Return program, designed to retrieve the rock and soil samples Perseverance has collected and stored in sealed tubes. In the future, the samples would be returned to Earth for detailed laboratory analysis.
The current concept envisions delivering a Mars lander near Jezero Crater, where Perseverance (far left) collects samples. A NASA-provided Sample Retrieval Lander (far right) would carry a NASA rocket (the Mars Ascent Vehicle). Perseverance would gather sample tubes it has cached on the Mars surface and transport them to the Sample Retrieval Lander, where they would then be transferred by a Sample Transfer Arm provided by ESA onto the Mars Ascent Vehicle. The arm is based on a human arm, with an elbow, shoulder, and wrist. The Mars Ascent Vehicle would launch a container with the sample tubes inside into orbit. Waiting in Mars orbit would be an ESA-provided Earth Return Obiter, which would rendezvous with and capture the Orbiting Sample Container using a NASA-provided Capture, Containment, and Return System. This system would capture and orient the container, then prepare it for return to Earth inside the Earth Entry System.
Also depicted is one of two Sample Recovery Helicopters NASA will develop to be transported to Mars on the Sample Retrieval Lander, just as the Ingenuity helicopter was carried on the Perseverance rover. The helicopters would serve as backups to Perseverance in transporting sample tubes to the Lander.
For more information, visit: mars.nasa.gov/msr.
NASA’s attempt to bring home part of Mars is unprecedented. The mission’s problems are not
Corinne Purtill March 25, 2024
Massive cost overruns. Key deadlines slipping out of reach. Problems of unprecedented complexity, and a generations worth of scientific progress contingent upon solving them.
Thats the current state of Mars Sample Return, the ambitious yet imperiled NASA mission whose rapidly ballooning budget has cost jobs at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Caada Flintridge and drawn threats of cancellation from lawmakers.
But not all that long ago, those same dire circumstances described the James Webb Space Telescope, the pioneering infrared scope that launched on Christmas Day 2021.
The biggest space telescope ever has so far proved to be
both
a scientific and public relations victory for NASA.
JWSTs The telescope’s
performance has surpassed all expectations, senior project scientist Jane Rigby said at a meeting
recently.this week.
Its first images were so hotly anticipated that the White House scooped NASAs announcement, releasing a dazzling view of thousands of galaxies the day before the space agency shared the first batch of pictures. Thousands of researchers have since applied for observation time.
The world has been rooting for this telescope to succeed, Rigby told the National Academies committee on astronomy and astrophysics.
NASA finally figures out how to open a $1-billion canister
Yet in the years before launch, the success and acclaim Webb now enjoys was far from guaranteed.
The telescope cost twice as much as initially anticipated and launched seven years behind its original schedule.
Some members of Congress at one point tried to
from the project.A fed-up Congress at one point
from the project.
Even the journal Nature referred to it at the time as the telescope that ate astronomy.
After a thorough assessment of the projects needs and flaws, NASA was able to turn the troubled venture around. Supporters of Mars Sample Return are hopeful that mission will follow a similar trajectory.
A lot of great science will come out of” Mars Sample Return, said Garth Illingworth, an astronomer emeritus at US Santa Cruz and former deputy director of the project that is now
the James Webb Space Telescope
.
JWST.
But theyve got to get real as to how to manage this.
Last year was a crisis point for Mars Sample Return, whose goal is to fetch rocks from the Red Planets Jezero crater and bring them back to Earth for study.
In July, the U.S. Senate presented NASA with an ultimatum in its proposed budget: Either present a plan for completing the mission within the $5.3 billion budgeted, or risk cancellation. A sobering independent review found in September that there was near zero probability of Mars Sample Return making its proposed 2028 launch date, and no credible way to fulfill the mission within its current budget. NASA is due to respond to that report this month.
The James Webb Space Telescope was
furtherfarther
along in its development journey when it reached a similar crossroads in 2010, six years after construction began. Frustrated with the ballooning budget and constantly postponed launch date, the U.S. House of Representatives included no funding for the telescope in its proposed budget, which would have ended the project had the Senate agreed.
In a statement, lawmakers castigated the mission as billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management, foreshadowing the criticisms that would be leveled at Mars Sample Return more than a decade later.
To forestall cancellation, Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) ordered an independent review of the project, which was under construction in her state.
The board determined that Webbs problems stemmed from a badly flawed initial budget. All the technical expertise needed to complete this ambitious project was there, the evaluators concluded. But getting it done with the amount of money currently set aside would be virtually impossible.
Illingworth remembered that review when he read the Mars Sample Return assessment, which offered a similarly stark conclusion.
Some of the words are very familiar, he said with a chuckle.
When the Mikulski review came out in 2010, Illingworth was deputy director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, which later became the James Webb Space Telescope.
He was sympathetic to the challenges facing Mars Sample Return managers, though chagrined that
JWST’s the James Webb Space Telescope’s
hard-earned lessons have
apparently
faded so quickly especially the importance of having a realistic budget from the
very
beginning.
NASA missions are managed by very smart people with established histories of doing very hard things. How does something as terrestrially mundane as budgeting continually trip them up?
The problem is that the models that you have as a cost estimator and they have very complex proprietary software models that attempt to understand these types of things are all built on things that have
happened
, in the past tense, said Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society.
By definition, when you’re trying something completely new, it’s very hard to estimate in advance how much something unprecedented will cost, Dreier said. That happened for Apollo, that happened for the space shuttle, it happened for James Webb, and its happening now for Mars Sample Return.
Mars Sample Return also has some mission-specific challenges that Webb didnt have to contend with.
For one,
its happening at the same time as Artemis, NASAs wildly expensive mission to return people to the moon.
Expected to cost $93 billion through 2025, Artemis got a 27% increase in its budget over the previous year, while Mars Sample Returns guaranteed funding is 63% less than last years spend.
And while NASAs ambitions are growing, its funding from Congress, adjusted for inflation, has been essentially flat for decades. That leaves little room for unexpected extras.
We are tasking the space agency with the most ambitious slate of programs in space since the Apollo era, but instead of Apollo-era budgets, it has one-third of 1% of U.S. spending to work with, Dreier said. If you stumble right now, the wolves will come for you. And that’s what is happening to Mars Sample Return.
Budget deal for NASA offers glimmer of hope for JPL’s Mars Sample Return mission
Not all ambitious scientific endeavors survive the kind of scrutiny
MSR the sample return
is facing. In 1993 Congress canceled the U.S. Department of Energys Superconducting Super Collider, an underground particle accelerator, citing concerns about rising costs and fiscal mismanagement. The government had already spent $2 billion on the project and dug 14 miles of tunnel.
But in the same week that Congress ended the supercollider, it agreed by a margin of a single vote to continue funding the International Space Station, a similarly expensive project whose cost overruns had been widely criticized. ISS launched in November 1998 and
is still
going strong.
(For now, anyway NASA will intentionally
in 2030.)
The space stations future was never seriously threatened again after that painfully close vote, just as Webbs future was never seriously questioned after the 2010 cancellation threat.
JPL, the institution managing Mars Sample Return, has already paid dearly for the missions initial stumbles, laying off more than 600 employees and 40 contractors after NASA ordered it to reduce its spending.
But projects that survive this kind of reckoning often emerge stronger and more resilient, Dreier said. They know the eyes of the nation and NASA and Congress are on them, so you have to perform.
NASA is set to reveal this month how it plans to move forward with
Mars Sample Return
.
MSR.
Those familiar with the mission say they believe it can still happen and that its still worth doing.
Do I have faith in NASA, JPL, all of those involved to be able to deliver on the Mars Sample Return mission with the attention and technical integrity that it requires? Absolutely, said Orlando Figueroa, chair of the
MSR the mission’s
independent review team and NASAs former Mars Czar.
It will require very difficult decisions and levels of commitment, including from Congress, NASA and the administration, [and] a recognition of the importance, just like was the case with James Webb, for what this mission means for space science.
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