Wednesday, NASA made a big announcement: To increase the odds that Martian rocks can successfully travel to Earth for up-close analysis, the space agency reworked its interplanetary delivery plan.
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) have agreed to “significant and beneficial changes” to an important part of the conceptual design of their Perseverance mission, NASA Associate Administrator Thomas Zurburchen said in a recent announcement.
This car-sized rover is the newest member of NASA’s robotic Mars fleet and arrived on the red planet in February 2021 via an unprecedented landing. Arguably one of his biggest responsibilities is the Mars Sample Return campaign. Perseverance’s six wheels leave grooves in the planet’s regolith as it works toward that goal, traversing Mars’ Jezero Crater to gather telltale sedimentary evidence that water, and possibly life, once existed there.
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took this image on March 17, 2022. Here it looks back at its wheel tracks on Mars, on the mission’s 381st Martian day, or sun.NASA/JPL-Caltech
In October, space agencies will delve into the details of their redesign: Instead of having Perseverance leave caches of its collection of pebbles on the surface of Mars for another yet-to-be-launched Earth spacecraft ‘must build, the existing Mars rover. will be the one to transport the precious packages to their launch site. In addition, Perseverance’s high-flying robotic companion, the Ingenuity helicopter, has inspired the design of two future helicopters that would drift over the Martian terrain to collect other samples. This duo would be part of an existing concept, NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander.
The next steps would be carried out by two other established concepts. ESA’s Sample Transfer Arm would pick up the tubes containing the samples and put them on NASA’s Mars Ascent Vehicle for a trip into the atmosphere.
The rocket will carry the soil samples from the surface of Mars to an ESA orbiting spacecraft known as the Earth Return Orbiter (ERO), which will then launch back to Earth and leave them for landing and recovery .
NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter took this image during its 20th flyby on February 25, 2022. This view from Ingenuity’s high-resolution color camera shows the northwestern part of a region, the “Séitah” region. NASA/JPL-Caltech
Agency officials said they are proposing this “advanced mission architecture” because they have determined that perseverance will last longer than previously thought. Recovery is scheduled to begin in late 2027, according to NASA’s announcement.
By giving Perseverance a new gig, NASA and ESA can skip building the intermediate robot they first envisioned, the Sample Fetch Rover, which ESA would have made. Delegates from the 22 European states of the continent’s space exploration program, Terrae Novae, got a look at this refined concept in May. The announcement goes on to say that the states will “estimate the discontinuation of development of the Sample Fetch Rover” in September. A month later, the new plans will begin to materialize.
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