NASA Is Now Ready to Undertake Its Mars Sample Return Campaign
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is now ready to undertake its Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign. The campaign is all about to bring pristine samples from Mars to Earth for scientific study. NASA has signed an agreement with European Space Agency (ESA) to return the first samples from another planet. Aiming this mission, NASA is preparing for the campaign and building on decades of scientific advancements and technical progress in Mars exploration.
At first, NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance which has been launched in July, 2020 and is more than halfway to Mars, aims to cache rock and regolith samples in its collection tubes then will leave some of them on the Martian surface for an ESA-provided "fetch" rover to collect and deliver to a NASA-provided Mars Ascent Vehicle, which then would launch the samples into orbit around Mars. An ESA-provided Earth Return Orbiter would then rendezvous with the samples in orbit around Mars and take them in a highly secure containment capsule for return to Earth in the 2030s.
Mars Sample Return is the top priority of the National Academies’ Planetary Science Decadal Survey for 2013-2022, and NASA has worked to mature the critical capabilities and overall MSR concept for the past three years and the cooperation between NASA and ESA in robotic and human space exploration as an asset for the robust campaign and commended both agencies' early and in-depth analysis of MSR implementation approaches to inform future planning and development.
NASA's Administrator Jim Bridenstine said “Mars Sample Return is something NASA needs to do as a leading member of the global community. We know there are challenges ahead, but that’s why we look closely at these architectures. And that’s why in the end, we achieve the big accomplishments.”
NASA associate administrator for science at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, Thomas Zurbuchen, said, "NASA is committed to mission success and taking on great challenges for the benefit of humanity, and one way we do that is by ensuring we are set up to succeed as early as possible,I thank the members of this board for their many hours of work resulting in a very thorough review. We look forward to continued planning and mission formulation in close partnership with ESA. Ultimately, I believe this sample return will be well worth the effort and help us answer key astrobiology questions about the Red Planet – bringing us one step closer to our eventual goal of sending humans to Mars."
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