Amid budget crunch, NASA seeks Hail Mary on Mars Sample Return

NASA’s Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission may be the most audacious robotic exploration campaign ever conceived: a multimission attempt to collect rock samples from the Red Planet and get them back to laboratories on Earth. But it is also exorbitantly expensive: A review last year found it could cost as much as $11 billion. Today, NASA’s leadership revealed that if the agency sticks with the current mission plan and spreads out its annual budget to politically acceptable levels, the samples wouldn’t be returned until 2040. “The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive, and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a media teleconference. So it’s time to go back to the drawing board. To get the samples back faster and more cheaply, NASA is putting out a call to private industry and the agency’s centers alike , shaking the trees to see whether any new MSR approaches fall out. Starting tomorrow until 17 May, the agency will be collecting industry proposals for MSR, with the goal of developing more detailed mission architectures by the fall. Planetary science advocates wonder whether the fresh proposals will really be able to improve on the plan developed over the past decade at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which is managing the mission. “This isn’t a plan, it’s a Hail Mary,” says Casey Dreier, chief of space policy for the Planetary Society. ...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news