NASA is calling on industry players to come up with alternative plans to return rock samples from Mars at a lower cost and earlier date.
The space agency has Tough to deal with the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, an ambitious plan to collect Martian dust and rocks collected by the Perseverance rover and drop them back on Earth. On Monday, NASA announced that it was seeking input from the space industry and the larger community at NASA’s various centers to revise plans for the mission. The space agency is calling for proposals for a proven, less complex mission architecture that would reduce costs and bring back samples earlier.
“We’re looking at possibilities out of the box to return samples earlier and at a lower cost,” Nikki Fox, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said on a conference call Monday. “That’s absolutely the case. A very ambitious goal, we need to find some very innovative new possibilities for the design…so we’re asking for the help of the NASA community to come together to develop a revised plan that leverages innovative and proven technologies.”
NASA’s MSR has come under intense scrutiny for exceeding its original budget and schedule. Initially, the mission’s budget was capped at $7 billion to return samples in the 2030s. However, as of now, MSR requires a budget of $11 billion and is expected to return samples by 2040. “The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive and the time it takes to return the samples, until 2040, is unacceptably long,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during the call.
September 2023, Independent Review Board (IRB) releases final report MSR called it a “highly constrained and challenging campaign” with “unrealistic budget and timeline expectations from the outset”.Based on this report, NASA announced Consider alternative architectures to accomplish their complex tasks and established a response team to address the report’s findings. Show paused while trying to sort out its budget.
The mission received $822.3 million in the 2023 spending bill, while NASA requested $949.3 million for Mars sample return in its 2023 spending bill. 2024 Budget Proposal.In April, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson revealed that the Mars sample return mission An additional $250 million is needed this fiscal yearplus another $250 million in 2024 to ensure a 2028 launch.
“It is possible to bring samples back sooner than 2040, it would just require a higher annual budget,” Fox said. “That’s not consistent with our current environment.” NASA’s 2024 budget gap is $2.31 billion Even as the agency braces for budget cuts due to the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the agency still hopes to receive results.
In response to Gizmodo’s question about whether NASA would adopt the same mission structure if it had a larger budget, it’s unclear where the two NASA officials stood. “The mission does have some cost and schedule challenges, so we have paused regardless of the budget environment,” Fox said.
Nielsen, on the other hand, chimed in to say that NASA “is in this situation because of cuts from Congress… and that’s how we have to respond.”
NASA will issue a call for proposals on Tuesday, with a deadline of May 17. NASA hopes to have all the information needed to make a decision and select a partner for the MSR mission by the fall. It’s a quick turnaround process for highly complex missions, which is why NASA wants to rely on technologies that have already been proven effective.
“We want to be able to get back to some of the more traditional, proven architectures that don’t require a huge technology leap but are very legacy-based so that we can reduce the risk and the cost and the time it takes to evolve,” Fox said. “Anything that requires a huge leap in technology, which usually requires experience to achieve, takes a lot of time.”
NASA clearly doesn’t have time as it prepares to send humans to the moon and plans to send the first humans to Mars in the 2040s.
“We operate from the premise that it’s an important national goal for us to return these samples,” Nelson said. “When we do that, it will allow us to plan astronaut destinations for Mars.”
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