- NASA scrapped its $11 billion plan to return samples from Mars to Earth by 2040.
- It now has not one but two new options to choose from — both are faster and cheaper.
- The samples could return as soon as 2035 and may contain the first-ever signs of ancient alien life.
The Perseverance rover is building up a stash of rocks on Mars that could contain the first-ever signs of alien life, but NASA is scrambling to figure out how it will bring them back to Earth for analysis.
NASA had a plan but it got “out of control,” in the words of the agency’s administrator, Bill Nelson. After a series of delays, the cost ballooned to $11 billion and the samples wouldn’t be landing on Earth until 2040.
So Nelson scrapped that plan in April and called for new proposals from outside and within NASA.
After months of assessment, on Tuesday, Nelson announced that “the wizards at NASA” had come up with a new plan, which could bring the Mars rocks to Earth as early as 2035 for as cheap as $5.8 billion.
“We want to have the quickest, cheapest way to get these 30 samples back,” Nelson said during a NASA presser on Tuesday.
For that to work, he said the incoming Trump administration will need to get on board.
“This is going to be a function of the new administration in order to fund this,” Nelson said. “And it’s an appropriation that has to start right now, fiscal year ’25.”
The search for alien life on Mars
NASA is not looking for active alien life but rather fossilized hints of long-gone microbial life.
The $2.4 billion Perseverance rover has spent the last four years exploring Jezero Crater, which was a lake billions of years ago. If microbes ever lived on Mars, this is the ideal spot to search for evidence of them.
In fact, in July, Perseverance stumbled on a rock in Jezero Crater that contained some of the strongest potential evidence of ancient alien life to date.
One of the rock’s outstanding features was tiny white “leopard spots” that could suggest the presence of chemical reactions similar to those associated with microbial life on Earth.
It’s still uncertain whether this is truly a sign of alien microbes. There could be non-biological explanations for the spots. To check, NASA needs to get that rock here to Earth for study in laboratories.
NASA’s new plan
Bringing Perseverance’s Mars samples to Earth will be complicated.
NASA must launch a mission that collects the samples from the Martian surface and launches them into Mars’ orbit, where they must meet up with a European spacecraft designed to grab them and carry them back to Earth.
To make things simpler and reduce costs, NASA focused on how it would drop that mission to the Martian surface.
In order to maximize the chance of the sample return mission moving forward, NASA chose not one but two options to pursue.
The first option would involve using existing technology that’s previously landed on Mars. That’s a sky crane, similar to the ones that helped lower NASA’s Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars’ surface.
The second option involves working with existing commercial partners, like SpaceX and Blue Origin. In that scenario, NASA would use new commercial technology, untested on Mars, like a heavy lander, Nelson said.
Both paths would cost around $6 or $7 billion and deliver the samples to Earth before 2040, NASA determined.
Nelson said he expects NASA to choose one of those paths forward in 2026 since the engineering work required to fully understand each option will take about a year.
He added that NASA will need $300 million to do that work in fiscal year 2025. Trump would have to include that expense in his budget proposal, and Congress would have to approve it.
“And if they want to get this thing back on a direct return earlier, they’re going to have to put more money into it, even more than $300 million in fiscal year 25. And that would be the case every year going forward,” Nelson said.
As part of the transition to the new Trump administration, Nelson will likely be handing the agency over to Trump-nominee Jared Isaacman, a billionaire and two-time SpaceX astronaut.
After Trump nominated him for NASA Administrator, Isaacman wrote in a post on X that “Americans will walk on the Moon and Mars.”
His position on the Mars Sample Return mission is unclear. Nelson said he had not spoken with Isaacman about it.
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