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’s troubled Mars Sample Return program is stuck at a crossroads—and is likely to remain in limbo until at least 2026—agency officials said at a press briefing on Tuesday. To bring this ...

NASA’s Perseverance rover has collected a sample from Mars that has textures “unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.” Known ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 goal of the Mars Sample Return Program, which is being planned jointly with the European Space Agency (ESA), is to retrieve samples of rock, gas and loose surface material that were collected ...

Back in July 2020, for example, the maximum total cost of the Mars sample return (MSR) campaign — a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) — was estimated to be around ...