NASA’s plan to bring Martian rocks back to Earth is getting serious

NASA recently announced further plans to study rock samples Mars which the Perseverance rover has collected, by building a specially designed laboratory for the purpose.

As is known, NASA has wanted to bring samples of Martian rocks. By studying these samples, we can understand more about life on the red planet and how it has evolved over time.

The project has been officially dubbed the Mars Sample Receiving (MSR), and NASA says it is “expected to be the most complex robotic spaceflight campaign ever attempted.” The plan is to start in about 10 years, after the Mars rock samples Perseverance collected return to Earth.

The new facility that will house the rock samples will be located at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and will receive and curate this rock as safely as possible. The curation process will be critical to note, as many are concerned about the possibility of disease or harmful contaminants that samples from Mars might bring to Earth.

Because of this, NASA says it is taking extreme precautions to ensure that such things cannot be obtained easily. Until the rock landed on Earth, no one knew what was in the sample tubes that Perseverance had collected. The hope, of course, is that these Martian rock samples will provide traces of ancient Martian life.

If this plan is successful and the samples it brings mean a lot to Mars, it will give us more proof that Mars was not always a frozen wasteland of a planet, furthering the belief that the land was once home to water and perhaps even some kind of alien life.