Next February, it will be two years since the Mars Perseverance probe and the Ingenuity lander arrived on the surface of Mars. A mission that’s still active and really successful, that’s also part of an incredibly ambitious project called Mars Sample Return, which, as the name suggests, involves retrieving some of the probe’s samples to bring back to Earth.

The realization of this mission will take a long time, since its start is scheduled for 2033. And it is because, both technologically and from the point of view of the budget, we are talking about a huge challenge, even though it is an unmanned mission. A failure in any detail, however small, can destroy years of work and a nice handful of millions of dollars, which is why we work with such long deadlines to allow all the necessary testing to be done. And even with this approach, delays to the original date can be commonplace, as we recently experienced with both the launch of the Artemis I mission and the production and launch of James Webb.

Perseverance in Jezero crater’s tasks include collecting samples from the surface of Mars, some samples that are stored in the rover itself, in order to select among them those that could be part of the first return mission to the red planet in a little more than a decade. A milestone that will also allow many tests to be carried out for a future manned mission to the planet under the Artemis program.

In the video on these letters, you can see a recreation from NASA of the key moments of the Mars Sample Return mission, but this is not necessarily the definitive plan. And interestingly, Endurance before long it will start saving ten selected samples finally in a special container. At the time of collection, and based on the great success of Ingenuity, it is likely that helicopters will be used to collect the samples and take them to the ship to begin sending them to Earth.

The work on the preparation and storage of these samples will take Perseverance about a month, which will then have to place them in easily accessible areas so that the arrival of helicopters there is not difficult.