NASA announced last week that it is significantly revising its long-awaited and troubled mission to bring pieces of Mars to Earth, a step that experts say is critical to the project. keep up The US space agency said it is continuing to support Mars Sample Return, but will soon work to make the program work under reduced budgets, while seeking proposals to make the mission faster and cheaper. to design. The mission is an ambitious attempt to obtain precious parts of the Red Planet, which could help scientists determine whether it has ever hosted life.
But the project’s future has been uncertain since last fall, when an independent review panel issued a damning report saying the mission needed an administrative overhaul amid the potential for cost overruns and delays. According to estimates in the 2020 report issued by the group, it would cost between $3.8 billion and $4.4 billion to recover the sample. The estimated cost over the life of the mission is now between $8.4 billion and $10.9 billion, with the samples arriving on Earth in 2040.
This would make the cost of retrieving Mars samples similar to the price of the James Webb Space Telescope, a scientific and engineering marvel that now monitors the universe from a solar orbit about a million miles from Earth. James Webb took decades off the ground, and took more money from NASA for scientific research than anyone expected. Bill Nelson, the administrator of NASA, said in a press conference held last week that the estimated date for the return of the samples in 2040 is “unacceptable.” He said: “This is the decade of the 21st century when we put astronauts on the surface of Mars. It is also impossible that the cost will reach $11 billion.” The cost of retrieving the Mars sample comes at a time when NASA’s scientific budget is insufficient to fund all the telescopes and space probes already in operation or being planned. With congressional support for the mission unclear, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory earlier this year laid off about 8% of its workforce. However, the Mars sample retrieval mission has been the highest priority in a decade of exploration of the planetary science community.
But recovering the original Martian remains for laboratory analysis on Earth requires unprecedented technological feats. NASA and its partners, including the European Space Agency, cannot send a spacecraft to the surface of Mars and expect it to launch again and return to Earth. Instead, the mission requires a fleet of spacecraft working as a single team. The Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in 2021, will collect and store samples of Martian rocks and soil in Jezero Crater (or Jezero Crater, a crater on Mars), where scientists believe that a river flowed into a lake several billion years ago. The rover has separate funding from the sample discovery project. “I think it’s fair to say that we’re committed to recovering the samples that are out there,” Nelson said. The original plan called for NASA to land another rover on Mars and collect samples from the Perseverance rover. This lander will have an ascent vehicle that will launch from Mars and carry samples into orbit. There, the materials will be transferred to another spacecraft, the Mars orbiter created by the European Space Agency, which is tasked with transporting samples to Earth.
At the press conference, NASA officials asked the scientific community and industry to propose new ideas that use more proven methods – and perhaps a simpler process – to recover samples. For his part, Nicola Fox, head of NASA’s Science Department, said at the press conference: “We are looking at unconventional capabilities that could return samples earlier and at a lower cost.” Bethany Elman, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology and president of the Planetary Society, said: “NASA needs to find the will to finish the mission that the spacecraft has already started.” She said: “I am confident that we have the technological equipment necessary to collect return samples together.” But when we choose to do difficult things, we must decide to do them and overcome the challenges together. “What we need is the leadership and the commitment to do this.”
* American writer
Published by special arrangement with the Washington Post Development and Syndication Service.
