The proposals present alternatives to the original Mars Sample Return program. Designed by NASA and the European Space Agency, the initial plan was deemed unwieldy after an independent review ...

The original design for the Mars Sample Return program, a partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency, was a complex one. The architecture involved multiple missions launching from ...

He supported the Mars Sample Return mission and helped get it moving through the agency's approval process. But the project threatened to devour the agency's science budget. "This was the thing ...

That’s the current state of Mars Sample Return, the ambitious yet imperiled NASA mission whose rapidly ballooning budget has cost jobs at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada ...

An illustration of the Mars Sample Return mission retrieving samples from the surface of the Red Planet. Illustration: NASA The findings from an independent review board suggest that NASA’s ...

A critical NASA mission in the search for life beyond Earth, Mars Sample Return, is in trouble. Its budget has ballooned from US$5 billion to over $11 billion, and the sample return date may slip ...

The plan is similar to but less technologically challenging than the original architecture that was ruled out because of high costs and a sample return in the 2040 timeframe. Option one would cost ...

The agency’s Mars Sample Return Program plans to bring these samples back to study them in state-of-the-art facilities on Earth. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS NASA has big goals for Mars. It wants to ...

Both the U.S. and China are scripting strategies for bringing goodies back to Earth from Mars via their respective Mars Sample Return (MSR) endeavors. For America, things are currently happening ...

NASA's Mars Sample Return Mission involves the Perseverance rover delivering tubes of rock samples to a robotic lander equipped with a rocket to bring back to Earth. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech ...

The Mars Sample Return effort was billions of dollars over budget and not expected to return to Earth with its samples until 2040. By Kenneth Chang Last year, Kenneth Chang wrote about a Martian ...