Can NASA Return Mars Samples to Earth? New Audit Raises Doubts (space.com) 71
Space.com writes that NASA's plan to return samples from Mars to the earth "is facing major challenges, according to a new report.
"Design, cost and scheduling are all significant obstacles, an audit report of NASA's Mars Sample Return (MSR) Program by the agency's Office of Inspector General (OIG) finds..." It involves landing on Mars to collect samples taken by the Perseverance rover and launching those samples to rendezvous with an orbiter, which will haul them to Earth. Perseverance is already on Mars, snagging and storing samples. But the program still needs to build a Sample Retrieval Lander and an Earth Return Orbiter, the latter being developed and funded by the European Space Agency. The Mars Sample Return program is one of the most technically complex, operationally demanding and ambitious robotic science missions ever undertaken by NASA, according to the OIG report.
The report notes design, architecture and schedule issues with the Capture Containment and Return System. These design issues resulted in adding about $200 million to the budget and one year of lost schedule... There is concern that, due to the number and significance of cost increase indicators so far, the $7.4 billion estimate is "premature and may be insufficient," the report finds. Now, the complexity... could drive costs to between $8 billion to $11 billion, the OIG report notes, citing a September 2023 Independent Review Board report. Notably, a July 2020 estimate listed costs of $2.5 to $3 billion.
These new figures indicate significant financial challenges and uncertainties... Issues include inflation, supply chain problems and increases in funding requests for specific program components.
"Design, cost and scheduling are all significant obstacles, an audit report of NASA's Mars Sample Return (MSR) Program by the agency's Office of Inspector General (OIG) finds..." It involves landing on Mars to collect samples taken by the Perseverance rover and launching those samples to rendezvous with an orbiter, which will haul them to Earth. Perseverance is already on Mars, snagging and storing samples. But the program still needs to build a Sample Retrieval Lander and an Earth Return Orbiter, the latter being developed and funded by the European Space Agency. The Mars Sample Return program is one of the most technically complex, operationally demanding and ambitious robotic science missions ever undertaken by NASA, according to the OIG report.
The report notes design, architecture and schedule issues with the Capture Containment and Return System. These design issues resulted in adding about $200 million to the budget and one year of lost schedule... There is concern that, due to the number and significance of cost increase indicators so far, the $7.4 billion estimate is "premature and may be insufficient," the report finds. Now, the complexity... could drive costs to between $8 billion to $11 billion, the OIG report notes, citing a September 2023 Independent Review Board report. Notably, a July 2020 estimate listed costs of $2.5 to $3 billion.
These new figures indicate significant financial challenges and uncertainties... Issues include inflation, supply chain problems and increases in funding requests for specific program components.
...So? (Score:2)
Re:...So? (Score:5, Insightful)
8-11 billion is almost literally pocket change for a government that regularly spends hundreds of billions a year or aid packages.
It makes no sense to justify spending money by pointing out that we spend money on other things that are even stupider.
Each proposal should be justified on its own merits.
Hell, the James Webb telescope ended up being over 10 billion and that was far less of a complex operation.
The complexity is irrelevant. The question is the value received for the money spent. JWST is doing science we could not do otherwise.
An obvious alternative for the rock return mission is to design a better robotic system to analyze rocks on Mars. Then there is no need to bring them to Earth. $8B can pay for a lot of robots.
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$8 billion can pay for a lot of anticipating.
A general-purpose robot with a large assortment of end effectors has a lot of flexibility.
If we want a new experiment, we just beam up the software.
Dust [Re:...So?] (Score:5, Informative)
A robot can only do what its designers anticipated it needing to do and that includes what experiments it can do with whatever samples it collects. As an example, nobody anticipated wind blown dust to be a problem so there was no way to clean the solar panels when they got covered with dust.
Actually we did [sciencedirect.com] anticipate that settled dust would be a problem on Mars, but the power systems engineers calculated that oversizing the solar arrays to produce power even when dusty was a better solution for the 90-day mission of MER rovers than trying to engineer an experimental dust removal system. And they were right; the Spirit rover lasted for 2269 days of its 90 day mission, and the Opportunity rover 5498.
Dust cleaning on Mars is a little more complicated of a problem that you might think. For example, your first thought might be "just use a brush", but keep in mind that Mars is very dry and thus a highly electrostatic environment; running a brush over an insulating (glass) surface is likely to build up charge and result in more dust sticking, not less. Complicated does not mean impossible, but it's a lot of work to engineer, design, build, and test under Mars-like conditions with Mars-like dust simulant.
If we can get some of the samples back to Earth, we're not limited by the types of experiments we planned for in advance, we can follow any unexpected results wherever they lead us.
True. And we can use equipment that's just too massive to send to Mars, like electron microscopes
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There is a good chance that China will do a sample return mission first, unless NASA really gets its skates on. So the question is really this: is 8-11 billion dollars worth spending to beat China to that particular record.
Personally, I don't think so. Japan did the first successful asteroid sample return mission, and the world didn't end.
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It depends. There are areas where it was suspected that there used to be water, or maybe there is still some ice. Dry lake beds, near the poles, that kind of thing. The odds could be pretty good.
I suppose they could always select a site that Perseverance has visited already, but probably wouldn't for political reasons. It's bound to happen eventually though, two states targeting the same site.
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China has put a robotic rover on the Moon. They described it as a testbed for a similar rover on Mars.
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Actually, with all due respect, this isn't 'science', NASA is a bureaucracy. Furthermore, with so many Americans struggling financially, it's unjustifiable waste. NASA has outlived its usefulness and has become way to large and unwieldy. NASA desperately needs to be downsized, decentralized and deinstitutionalized.
What we really need is a real rotating orbital "station", orbital assembly platforms and a real moon base with real astronauts and real space workers. Not a bunch of overpaid elites sitting in fan
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Re: ...So? (Score:1)
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Technically Musk's plan is to go to Mars and stay there, not come back.
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He says try the other guy.
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For Elon Musk
Yes. Leon's red Roadster will get to Mars before Leon himself does.
Can we at least agree... (Score:3)
...on either metric or imperial units this time?
Re: Can we at least agree... (Score:2)
Hardly surprising (Score:2)
There is only one viable option right now (Score:4, Insightful)
You have to launch FROM Mars to Earth. That means you need to put a fairly large rocket on Mars. With fuel for the return trip. The only way to get a large rocket on Mars, ensure it's close to your pickup site, and have it launch back to Earth is to have a tail-landing rocket that can choose its landing site.
Realistically, there is currently only one entity that can tail-land a rocket on Mars, so going anywhere else to get the job done means waiting for that anywhere else to catch up with the technology. This is currently a Space-X job and there is no second choice yet.
The only way to ensure enough fuel is present to supply that rocket for the return trip is to either first land a rocket with an in-situ fuel generator or to wait for the sample return rocket to fuel itself with one. Personally, I'd go for sending the fuel generator as a separate rocket because you end up able to leave useful equipment on the planet for future use. The fuel generator requires power and hydrogen, but additional missions would only need to bring the hydrogen to get the system to produce more methane fuel and not the entire setup.
TL;DR: Contract Space-X to put a Sabatier reactor on Mars (including solar panels, a hydrogen supply, and a little utility rover to deploy those panels and keep them free of dust) using a tail-landing rocket. If successful, contract with them again for the follow up sample return.
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Do some research on the term 'landing ellipse', maybe a bit more on the average distance a Mars rover travels in a sol.
Standard landing techniques have a massive set of error bars on the destination coordinates, well beyond the practical limits of "just use a rover to take stuff to where it lands".
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The Japanese recently landed within a 100 metres of their target on the Moon, unluckily upside down. https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
Back in the '70's the plan for a lunar base included the first module (a modified LEM) use a radio beacon for subsequent landers to land close by. Similar could likely be done on Mars.
Does raise some questions. A Mars lander is likely to use a parachute for part of its descent, harder to control. And how close to your target do you want a rocket landing? Rocket blast, possibi
Re: There is only one viable option right now (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't need to carry your return-to-earth fuel to the surface of Mars. That would be hugely inefficient and there would be no point. You launch an orbiter and a lander/ascent vehicle. Most of your fuel stays on the orbiter. The lander comes down, picks up the samples, and the ascent vehicle only needs to carry them into low mars orbit. From there, you dock with the orbiter, which has your return fuel. This is basically how every Apollo mission was done - the lander only carries enough fuel for landing and ascent into low orbit and docking.
Although still fairly complex, the Mars ascent vehicle is a lot more straightforward than an Earth launch. You have 1/3 the gravity *and* 1% of the atmosphere. You only need to get to low orbit and on top of that, you're carrying a much, much smaller payload. It would be an all-solid-fuel rocket of surprisingly small size.
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All true, only one complication: the signal travel time between Mars and Earth is between 4 and 24 minutes. On the Moon you can do things in real time, on Mars: not so much. So you have to do things autonomously (w/o astronauts). Doable, sure, but landing/flying/taking off/docking needs to be autonomous. And thus a wee bit more expensive :-)
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Arguably it's easier to do it all automatically. The Soviets had in-orbit automatic docking in the 60s. Their plan for a Moon landing was to have it mostly automated too.
It may actually be simpler than trying to build controls and instrumentation for a human operator to use. NASA was actually planning to make its initial Mercury flights fully automatic, but the pilots insisted on being able to fly the craft themselves rather than just being along for the ride.
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Actually, the problem isn't complexity, the real problem is NASA is a bureaucracy and all the factors like the Peter Principle and corruption.
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The delta-v from the surface to Mars orbit is more than twice that for a Mars to Earth transfer, and about half that for the surface to low Earth orbit. Your ascent rocket is somewhere between a good bit and a huge bit less efficient than what you'd use in space too. So you don't have to take all your fuel down with you, but you do have to take most of it. A sample return rocket would would be the biggest thing ever landed on Mars by about a factor of 50.
Re: There is only one viable option right now (Score:2)
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I don't know which "crafts" you're comparing.
If you want to launch off the surface of Mars to orbit with a chemical rocket you're going to need something that weighs in the ~50 ton range. Possibly quite a bit more because you can't use cryogenic propellant unless you want to get fancy and make your fuel there, oh yeah, and you want to bring some rocks up.
Re: There is only one viable option right now (Score:2)
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Yeah, I made a mistake in the calculation. To be fair, the NASA paper I was looking at was using mass in units of "MT".
It would still be the heaviest thing ever landed on Mars. The proposed lander is about 4 tonnes. So 4 Curiosities rather than 50.
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How did you come up with this "factor of 50"? The Perseverance rover weighs about one ton. The planned Mars Ascent Vehicle would be about half of that. Are you really saying that the people who design this stuff for a living are off by a factor of 100?
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Oops, you're right. Must have added an extra zero somewhere.
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You only really need to get it to orbit. If we give up on rocket based space travel and focus on solar sails, we lower the cost of shifting from Earth to Mars orbit or back by orders of magnitude. We also open up the possibility of harvesting reaction mass, mostly water for hydrogen and oxygen fuels, from the rings around Saturn. Those could also provide the mass of water for life support and terraforming, at least terraforming on a local basis.
It's a much larger initial investment, but the return on that i
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You want to replace rockets with solar sails for interplanetary missions... and want to use them to travel to Saturn to collect raw materials.
Solar sails have infinite ISP because they use no propellant, but a thrust of 7.8125 Ã-- 10-6 newtons per m^2 at 1 AU from the Sun, which due to the inverse square law will degrade as you travel further out.
Not only will you effectively wait 'forever' to get useful mass to Mars, but you're going to need to stack several more 'forevers' on there to go any further.
Re: There is only one viable option right now (Score:2)
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Re: There is only one viable option right now (Score:2)
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Most of the early orbital boosters were ICBMs modified for orbital launch, most notably Atlas, Titan, and Thor.
More recently the Minotaur rocket family are converted Minuteman and Peacekeeper ICBMs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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As others are saying, putting a satellite in orbit requires mostly "long flat trajectories", not "straight up."
KSP demonstrates this rather well. Going straight up gets you into space rather easily, but not into orbit. Remember, orbit is basically "going so fast that you fall towards the earth and miss". This requires about 8 km/s.
The problem the ICBMs probably had? More likely "not enough thrust". The USSR, I remember, had an initial advantage because they couldn't get their nuclear bombs as small as t
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It's (relatively) easy to deliver a mass to the surface of Mars.
What is not easy is to land a rocket big enough to launch from Mars, intact, with fuel, and in a launch-ready position.
Starship can easily deliver an ICBM to Mars, if you're OK with it being delivered in the form of debris spread over a random section of the Martian surface.
Re:There is only one viable option right now (Score:5, Informative)
The plan is to put the sample return lander-launcher on the surface, then have it rendezvous in Mars orbit with the Earth return vehicle. That orbiting vehicle will carry the fuel and the motor needed to "punch it home".
This has already been done. The Apollo missions. The LM Lunar Module descended and landed after separating from the orbiting CM Command Module. To return, the lunar ascent vehicle left the landing stage behind as it carried astronauts and samples back to lunar orbit to rejoin the CM. The SM Service Module on the back of the CM had the fuel and motor to leave lunar orbit and return home.
The ascent vehicle carried two astronauts, moon rock samples, life support equipment and supplies, and a complex docking mechanism. Heavy. In contrast, the Mars samples to be returned are the sealed vials that Perseverance is dropping, probably just a few kilos net, without any life support requirements. So, the ascent vehicle will be carrying a small payload, and with efficient motors and fuels, it seems likely that details will work out easily enough out to get back to low Mars orbit, just like on Apollo.
Nonetheless, still a daunting complex but inspiring mission.
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Realistically, there is currently only one entity that can tail-land a rocket on Mars
Why? Are SpaceX magic? Do you not understand how R&D works? I mean at the time we decided to land someone on the moon there was literally no entity that could put a human on the moon. Yet we did it anyway without Musk's fanbois saying he's our only hope.
Re: There is only one viable option right now (Score:1)
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The way R&D works is that if you start the R&D on developing a rocket with the capabilities of Starship today, it might be ready in 20 years. Nobody is starting that process today. The mission is scheduled for the early 2030s -- less than a decade from now. Even with a sudden Apollo-sized investment of the whole country working together for it and bypassing all procedures and safety laws (which is absurd), there still might not be enough time.
#BringThemHome (Score:1)
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Or if you're a Russian troll, get a better script.
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You think about trans people often?
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Elon Musk (Score:2)
could do it a lot cheaper.
The math - Mars is 22 times easier to escape from (Score:2)
Earth is sort of on the limit of what a chemical rocket can launch anything meaning full from.
Do it the old fashioned way (Score:2)
...smash an asteroid into Mars, spewing debris toward Earth. Start with a house-sized asteroid to incrementally alter the course of gradually bigger asteroids until you redirect one big enough to do the job. It doesn't require much rocket fuel because one is merely stealing momentum from other asteroids and planets via pin-point "bungee" targeting; our probes do it all the time. It's essentially "gravity mining" or "momentum mining". It works in theory, but is not quick. One of the cleverest ideas I've ever
Can't Elon just pick them up when he lands there? (Score:1)