NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is struggling with rising costs and a delayed schedule, prompting the private sector to seek more efficient methods to ensure this mission is completed. The Mars Sample Return, NASA’s mission to search for life beyond Earth, is experiencing problems. Its budget has increased from $5 billion to more than $11 billion, and its return date, for example, could be pushed back from the end of this decade to the 2040s.

The mission will be the first to attempt to return rock samples from Mars to Earth so scientists can analyze them for signs of past life.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson stated at a press conference on April 15, 2024 that the mission is too expensive and too slow in its current form. NASA gave private companies a month to submit proposals to return the samples faster and more cost-effectively.

As an astronomer who studies cosmology and wrote a book about the first missions to Mars, I watched the sample return myth emerge. Mars is the closest and best place to look for life beyond Earth, and if this ambitious NASA mission fails, scientists will miss the chance to learn more about the red planet.

Mars population

The first NASA missions to reach the surface of Mars in 1976 revealed that the planet resembled a cold desert, uninhabitable without a thick atmosphere that protected life from the sun’s ultraviolet radiation. But research in the last decade suggests that the planet may have been much warmer and wetter several billion years ago.

Mars rovers Curiosity and Perseverance have shown that the planet’s early environment was suitable for microbial life. They found traces of surface water and the chemical building blocks of life in the distant past. Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, is still active; Its twin, Perseverance, which will land on Mars in 2021, will play a critical role in the sample return mission.

Why do astronomers need Mars samples?

NASA first looked for life in a rock on Mars in 1996. Scientists claimed to have discovered microscopic bacterial fossils in the Martian meteorite ALH84001. This meteorite is a fragment of Mars that landed in Antarctica 13,000 years ago and was found in 1984. Scientists disagree on whether the meteorite actually contained biology, and most scientists today agree that there is not enough evidence that the rock contains fossils.

Several hundred Martian meteorites have been found on Earth in the last 40 years. These are free samples that fell to Earth; So while it may seem intuitive to study them, scientists can’t tell where on Mars these meteors came from. Moreover, they are blown off the planet’s surface by impacts, and these violent events can easily destroy or alter the faint evidence of life in the rock.

There is no substitute for sampling an area known to have been habitable in the past. As a result, the institution faced a price tag of $700 million per ounce, making these samples the most expensive material ever collected.

A challenging and challenging task

Returning Martian rocks to Earth is the most difficult task NASA has ever attempted, and the first phase has already begun.

Perseverance collected more than two dozen rock and soil samples and deposited them on the floor of Crater Lake, an area that was likely once flooded and may have harbored life. The rover places samples in containers the size of test tubes. Once the rover has filled all the sample tubes, it will collect them and deliver them to the landing site of NASA’s sample collection vehicle. The Sample Retrieval Vehicle includes a rocket to deliver samples into orbit around Mars.

The European Space Agency has developed an Earth Return Orbiter that will rendezvous with a rocket in orbit and capture a basketball-sized sample container. The samples will then be automatically sealed in a biocontainment system and transferred to the Earth Entry Capsule, which is part of the Earth Return Orbiter. After the return journey home, the entry capsule will descend to the Earth’s surface by parachute.

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. This is responsible for the growing budget and long schedule.

Sample return puts pressure on the bank

The Mars Sample Return blew a hole in NASA’s budget, threatening other missions that needed funding. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the NASA center behind the mission, recently laid off more than 500 employees. It’s possible that the Mars Sample Return budget was partially responsible for the layoffs, but it was also attributed to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory being overwhelmed with planetary missions and suffering from budget cuts.

Over the past year, a report by an independent review panel and a report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General raised deep concerns about the viability of the sample return mission. These reports described the nature of the mission as overly complex and noted problems such as inflation, supply chain problems, and unrealistic cost and schedule estimates.

NASA was also appalled by Congress. For fiscal year 2024, the Senate Appropriations Committee cut NASA’s planetary science budget by more than half a billion dollars. The mission may even be canceled if NASA cannot cover the costs.

non-standard thinking

Faced with these challenges, NASA called on the private sector for innovative projects to reduce the cost and complexity of the mission. Bids must be submitted by May 17, an extremely short deadline for such a complex project. It will also be difficult for private companies to develop a plan that experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been developing for a decade.

A major potential player in this case is commercial space company SpaceX. NASA is already working with SpaceX to return America to the moon. For the Artemis III mission, SpaceX will attempt to land humans on the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. But the massive Starship rocket that SpaceX will use for Artemis has completed only three test flights and requires significant additional development before NASA can trust it with human cargo.

In principle, a Starship rocket could return large amounts of Mars rock in a two-year mission and at much lower cost. But Starship is associated with great risk and uncertainty. It’s unclear whether this rocket will be able to return samples that Perseverance has already collected.

Starship is using the launch pad and needs to be refueled to return. However, there is neither a launch pad nor a gas station in the Jezero crater. Starship is designed to carry humans, but if astronauts are going to go to Mars to collect samples, SpaceX will need a larger Starship rocket than what it’s tested so far.

Sending astronauts also involves additional risk and expense, and the human strategy may be more difficult than NASA’s current plan. Given all these challenges and limitations, NASA decided to see if the private sector could offer a winning solution. We will learn the answer to this next month. Written by Chris Impey, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at the University of Arizona.