ALH84001

• A critical NASA mission in the search for life beyond Earth, Mars Sample Return, is in trouble.
• Its budget has ballooned from US$5 billion to over $11 billion, and the sample return date may slip from the end of this decade to 2040.

The habitability of Mars

• But studies conducted over the past decade suggest that the planet may have been much warmer and wetter several billion years ago.
• Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, is still active; its twin, Perseverance, which landed on Mars in 2021, will play a crucial role in the sample return mission.

Why astronomers want Mars samples

• This meteorite is a piece of Mars that landed in Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was recovered in 1984.
• They’re free samples that fell to Earth, so while it might seem intuitive to study them, scientists can’t tell where on Mars these meteorites originated.
• There’s no substitute for bringing back samples from a region known to have been hospitable to life in the past.

A compelling and complex mission

• Bringing Mars rocks back to Earth is the most challenging mission NASA has ever attempted, and the first stage has already started.
• The rover inserts the samples in containers the size of test tubes.
• 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.

Sample return breaks the bank

• Mars Sample Return has blown a hole in NASA’s budget, which threatens other missions that need funding.
• It’s likely that Mars Sample Return’s budget partly caused the layoffs, but they also came down to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory having an overfull plate of planetary missions and suffering budget cuts.
• Within the past year, an independent review board report and a report from the NASA Office of Inspector General raised deep concerns about the viability of the sample return mission.

Thinking out of the box

• Proposals are due by May 17, which is an extremely tight timeline for such a challenging design effort.
• And it’ll be hard for private companies to improve on the plan that experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had over a decade to put together.
• For the Artemis III mission, SpaceX will attempt to land humans on the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

• It’s not clear whether that rocket could return the samples that Perseverance has already gathered.
• Sending astronauts also carries extra risk and cost, and a strategy of using people might end up more complicated than NASA’s current plan.
• With all these pressures and constraints, NASA has chosen to see whether the private sector can come up with a winning solution.

Chris Impey receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.