NASA Mars Sample Return

2023: Planned Project Failure

The return from the surface of Mars of about 500 grams of soil samples in its current form is "almost impossible." This was reported to NASA in a public report on the program, published on September 21, 2023.

NASA planned to launch the Mars Sample Return (abbreviated as MSR) project in 2028. The budget of the program is about $4.4 billion. In its report, the commission said that both the budget and the timeline of the project were "unrealistic."

The MSR project in its current form is unrealizable

MSR is a priority project for deep space exploration. However, MSR was started with an unrealistic budget and deadlines from the very beginning. In addition, the project has a cumbersome organizational structure. As a result, at the moment the project does not have a realistic reliable schedule, estimate, and technical component achievable for available budget funds - the report says.

The conclusions of the independent report coincide with the concerns of the Ars Techica portal, whose article on the project budget was published three months before the publication of the independent NASA report. Many scientists, including former NASA employees, expressed concern about the program's huge budget. In their opinion, such funding can ruin other projects.

The MSR project aims to obtain various samples from Mars. To do this, NASA must build a special spacecraft capable of reaching the planet and landing there. He should load the samples. Responsible for the samples is the Perseverance rover, which collects data and samples and stores them in small titanium pipes. The pipes will be loaded into a special rocket manufactured by Lockheed Martin, which, after launch, will launch a container with samples into orbit, from where another spacecraft built by the European Space Agency will take them. And this device will take samples to the orbit of the Earth. The entire mission according to the plan should take about five years.

Obtaining soil and air samples is extremely important for studying the planet and testing the hypothesis of the existence of life on the red planet. In the distant past, Mars was like Earth. It had a thick atmospheric layer, rivers and lakes.^[1]

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