NASA recently deemed this situation unacceptable. In April 2024, agency chief Bill Nelson announced that an overhaul of the ...

NASA's beleaguered Mars Sample Return program currently faces extreme costs of up to $11 billion and a timeline that could reach 2040. The year 2025 isn't even a week old and NASA is already ...

"If they want to have a Mars sample return, which I can't imagine that they don't, I don't think we want the only sample return coming back on a Chinese spacecraft." He called a planned Chinese ...

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson left a final decision on a new mission architecture to the next NASA administrator working ...

NASA earlier this week said it needs more time to determine the path forward for its Mars Sample Return program, punting a ...

Anyone hoping for a clear path forward this year for NASA’s imperiled Mars Sample Return mission will have to wait a little longer. The agency has settled on two potential strategies for the first ...

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 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 ...

But then something changed. The Mars Sample Return mission, as it's called for now, is a very complex endeavor. It requires a vehicle on the surface of Mars to collect the soil samples and store ...

There appears to be an unofficial robotic space race underway involving the Red Planet. Both the U.S. and China are scripting strategies for bringing goodies back to Earth from Mars via their ...

The year 2025 isn't even a week old and NASA is already gearing up for its first big announcement, this one about the agency's ambitious, yet beleaguered, Mars sample return mission. Today (Jan. 7 ...