NASA describes ideas for bringing samples of Mars home more affordably

By Cat Hofacker|January 7, 2025

Press briefing puts choices on the public record before Trump team’s arrival

AIAA SCITECH FORUM, ORLANDO, Fla. — With a new presidential administration poised to take charge of NASA, the agency today outlined options for reducing the cost of one of its flagship endeavors, the Mars Sample Return mission.

The estimated cost of MSR had swelled to $11 billion, and the schedule for returning 30 pinky-sized tubes of Martian rocks and soil had slipped by a decade.

“I think it was a responsible thing to do to not hand the new administration just one alternative if they want to have a Mars Sample Return, which I can’t imagine that they don’t,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said during a virtual press conference that I tuned into during AIAA’s SciTech conference.

Nelson and Nicky Fox, head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, outlined ideas that Nelson said could get the samples to the Utah desert by 2035, rather than 2040. That’s the date that an independent review board assembled by NASA said that the timeline would slip to if something wasn’t done. Congress would need to approve at least $300 million per year starting with fiscal 2025 to achieve the 2035 date, Nelson added.

Nelson and Fox described two options for more efficiently achieving one of the key tasks in the return mission: delivering the Jet Propulsion Lab-built lander, robotic arm and accompanying Mars Ascent Vehicle to the surface, so that the samples can be grasped, placed in a protective container and boosted to Mars orbit by the MAV.

One option would be to lower the lander and MAV to the surface using the JPL’s twice-proven sky crane method. Retrorockets on the descent vehicle would slow it to a stop meters above the surface, and the lander and MAV would be unspooled gently down on tethers — the same way that JPL landed the Curiosity rover in 2012 and Perseverance in 2021. The original plan called for the lander to have engines and propellant tanks for a powered landing.

NASA estimates that switching to this technique would help bring the total mission cost down to between $6.6 billion and $7.7 billion.

In the other option, the lander and MAV would ride directly to the surface in a “heavy lander” that would be provided by a company yet to be chosen. The payload would then be placed on the surface in a technique yet to be decided. NASA thinks that this method would help bring the cost down to $5.8 billion to $7.1 billion.

This option is a result of NASA’s call for proposals last April for ideas to bring down the cost of Mars Sample Return. Nelson revealed today that SpaceX and Blue Origin, who are already on contract to build massive lunar landers under the Artemis program, submitted proposals for vehicles to deliver the sample lander and MAV to the surface. For Artemis, SpaceX is on contract to land astronauts in the lunar south polar region aboard a version of Starship, and Blue Origin would do the same with its Blue Moon lander.

For both the sky crane and commercial “heavy lander” options, the sample lander and MAV would be redesigned to be “smaller in volume and smaller in weight,” Nelson said. The samples also would be transferred by a robotic arm originally built as a spare for Perseverance, relieving NASA from having to build a new robotic arm. And to reduce complexity, the solar panels on the lander would be replaced by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. This way, the lander could keep operating even if an infamous Mars dust storm were to block the sun.

Fox estimated that it would take about 18 months to fully analyze the two options and the proposed changes to the lander and MAV.

The day before the virtual press conference, JPL Director Laurie Leshin talked up her center’s sky crane technology in a speech here, but said she wouldn’t mind a commercial ride either: “If we’ve got Starships going to Mars, great. We’d love to put our lander inside of one of those.”