NASA is looking for a new way to return valuable Mars samples to Earth. These samples were collected by the Perseverance rover from Crater Lake on Mars, where a lake and river delta existed billions of years ago. Obtaining samples is one of NASA’s primary scientific goals; Studying pristine material from the Red Planet in well-equipped laboratories around the world could reveal important information about Mars — including whether life likely once existed there, NASA officials say.

NASA officials announced today (April 15) that the agency has been using the Mars Sample Return (MSR) architecture for some time, but repeated delays and cost overruns have made the original plan impractical.

“The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive, and not returning the samples by 2040 is unacceptable for too long,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said on a call with reporters this afternoon. said.

This price is the maximum estimate calculated by an independent panel of experts who published their findings last September. For perspective, a July 2020 study estimated the total value of MSRs to be between $2.5 billion and $3 billion.

A team from NASA analyzed the September results and determined that the agency would not be able to return Perseverance samples to Earth until 2040 if the architecture existed. The finding cited reasons including current budget constraints and a desire not to use other high-priority science efforts, such as the Dragonfly drone mission to Saturn’s large moon Titan.

Meanwhile, the created architecture was supposed to send the descent module built by NASA to the Jezero crater. This lander will carry a rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) and potentially several small search helicopters similar to NASA’s pioneering Ingenuity helicopter.

Perseverance’s goal was to deliver samples to the lander and then load them onto the MAV. Helicopters may have done some of this loading work, too, especially if Perseverance was not in good condition when the lander arrived. The MAV will then send the samples into Mars orbit, where a spacecraft built by the European Space Agency will pick up the container and pull it back to Earth.

But NASA is now looking for a new way to reduce costs and get samples here faster. Saving money will help the agency’s other science projects, and speeding up the timeline could help the agency plan future crewed trips to Mars.

“Unacceptable, [чекати] There’s plenty of time,” Nelson said today. “This is the decade of the 2040s when we send astronauts to Mars.”

The wheels of the new plan (which may incorporate elements of the old plan) are already turning. Nelson said today that NASA is reaching out to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the main robotic planetary exploration facility in Southern California, and other agency research centers for innovative MSR ideas.

NASA is also looking to the private sector: The agency plans to launch a tender for new ideas from the commercial sector tomorrow (April 16), Nicky Fox, deputy administrator for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, said in an interview today.

He added that NASA will hold an industry day on April 22 and will accept bids until May 17. The goal is to have enough information by late fall or early winter to begin charting a new path in MSR development. “We’re opening this up to everyone because we want to get every new, fresh idea we can,” Nelson said.

Of course, it is currently unclear what this new path will look like. But Fox previewed some possibilities, such as a smaller, cheaper MAV and a scaled-down number of samples returned (from 30 sealed Perseverance tubes to unspecified smaller numbers). Fox and Nelson emphasized that despite the difficulty of the mission, MSR remains a priority for NASA—after all, humanity has never launched a rocket from the surface of another planet (although three countries have launched from the moon). challenges the project currently faces.

“I think it’s fair to say we want to get the samples that are there — at least some of those samples,” Nelson said. “We operate on the basis that this is an important national goal.”