Once delivered to the lander, these sample tubes will be placed aboard a rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle. Accordingly, it plans to send two helicopters much like Ingenuity, which remains operational on Mars, as a backup plan to retrieve the samples. Because Perseverance landed on Mars in 2021, NASA has decided it is too risky to count entirely on the rover being operational a decade from now.
However, Perseverance may be a little long in the tooth by the time the lander arrives.
After this vehicle lands on Mars, the Perseverance rover-which has been collecting and storing samples of Martian dust in 38 titanium tubes, each the size of a large hotdog-will bring its samples to the lander. Under this plan, NASA will develop a large "Sample Retriever Lander" that nominally is due to launch in 2028. It has also been a top priority of the scientific community, both to better understand the geological history of Mars as well as to look for evidence of life-past or present-on Mars.Īfter several iterations, NASA and its European partners settled on the project's current design last summer. NASA and its international partners, including the European Space Agency, have wanted to return material from Mars for decades. All told, the total cost of the Mars Sample Return mission is now about $10 billion. It does not include launch costs, operating costs over a five-year period, nor construction of a new sample-receiving facility to handle the rocks and soil from Mars. Moreover, this only represents the cost to build and test the different components of the mission. Rather, the new estimate put it at $8 to $9 billion. The development cost for the mission was no longer $4.4 billion. They had some sobering news: the price had doubled. Now, Ars has learned, the problem may be even worse than Zurbuchen imagined.Īccording to two sources familiar with the meeting, the Program Manager for the mission at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Richard Cook, and the director of the mission at NASA Headquarters, Jeff Gramling, briefed agency leaders last week on costs. "This was the thing that gave me sleepless nights toward the end of my tenure at NASA and even after I left," said Zurbuchen, who left NASA after seven years leading its Science Mission Directorate at the end of 2022. But the project threatened to devour the agency's science budget. He supported the Mars Sample Return mission and helped get it moving through the agency's approval process. NASA/JPL-Caltech reader comments 456 withĭuring his final months as the chief of NASA's science programs last year, there was one mission Thomas Zurbuchen fretted about more than any other-the agency's ambitious plan to return rocks from Mars to Earth.
0 kommentar(er)
