Can NASA's troubled Mars Sample Return mission be saved?

[Admin]

An independent review team is delivering a final report to NASA leadership to determine if the agency's Mars Sample Return mission is salvageable after facing scrutiny for its $11 billion budget.

Can NASA's troubled Mars Sample Return mission be saved? : Read more

 

[monkeyonmars]

I think Musk can do it for less than $11 billion. Just got to get that fuel transfer working.

 

[danR]

I think Musk can do it for less than $11 billion. Just got to get that fuel transfer working.

Not only can SpaceX do it for less, the whole project is being rendered moot by the company's own boots-on-the-ground timeline. They could have a complete robotic lab on Mars <2030 that will simply obviate any need for a 'sample return'.
Before landing people on Mars, Musk's project necessarily entails not only such a lab, but multiple sampling labs all over the surface to find optimum landing spots for establishing a colonizing base. It will be a trivial matter to add the assets needed to accomplish this present, mooted, sampling project.

 

[Nik0101]

Not only can SpaceX do it for less, the whole project is being rendered moot by the company's own boots-on-the-ground timeline. They could have a complete robotic lab on Mars <2030 that will simply obviate any need for a 'sample return'.
Before landing people on Mars, Musk's project necessarily entails not only such a lab, but multiple sampling labs all over the surface to find optimum landing spots for establishing a colonizing base. It will be a trivial matter to add the assets needed to accomplish this present, mooted, sampling project.

Ah, yes. And I'm sure he'll begin building his Mars base with AI powered, self-replicating, Go-Go dancing robots at the same time. The base that should have been in operation 5 years ago.

Musk says a lot of things and habitually gives overly optimistic timelines. The next launch window is in 2026 and the following one is in 2028/2029. His company will have to demonstrate capability to design, build, and land multiple labs & rovers on the Moon before getting anywhere near Mars within those 4 years.

 

[analysisparalysis]

Not only can SpaceX do it for less, the whole project is being rendered moot by the company's own boots-on-the-ground timeline. They could have a complete robotic lab on Mars <2030 that will simply obviate any need for a 'sample return'.
Before landing people on Mars, Musk's project necessarily entails not only such a lab, but multiple sampling labs all over the surface to find optimum landing spots for establishing a colonizing base. It will be a trivial matter to add the assets needed to accomplish this present, mooted, sampling project.

While I wish SpaceX could meet their objectives as stated, Elon has a history of overpromising schedule. Back in 2018, he stated it would be likely SpaceX would send astronauts to Mars by 2024. https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-mars-plan-timeline-2018-10 In addition, per their report, the GAO "found that SpaceX used more than 50 percent of its total schedule to reach PDR in November 2022. On average, NASA major projects used about 35 percent of the total schedule to reach this milestone". Space takes time, even for SpaceX.

GAO Report: https://www.gao.gov/assets/d24106256.pdf

 

[blueamber]

OK, whats the hurry? Yeah, a scientist wants to be first to ID a bug on mars, but we are getting there eventually anyway... why spend extra money on scientific fluff, spend it colonizing mars... let a martian find the bug!

 

[Nik0101]

OK, whats the hurry? Yeah, a scientist wants to be first to ID a bug on mars, but we are getting there eventually anyway... why spend extra money on scientific fluff, spend it colonizing mars... let a martian find the bug!

"ID a bug"?? "Scientific fluff"?? Wait... What!?
Do you mean definitively answering the question mankind has been pondering since when we were living in caves & looked up at the sky at night? The specific reason we've been sending missions to Mars since the 1960s in the first place?

If you think sending robotic missions is expensive, getting squishy and fragile humans to Mars and back will be exponentially more costly.

Note: All missions sent to land on Mars are thoroughly sterilized so we don't introduce any microorganisms onto the planet or mistake Earth microbia for life present or past life native to the Red Planet.

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

As long as politicians are not involved, I'm sure we can get a program that is cheaper for the US. (Remember that ESA is currently paying up for the orbital return craft.)

OK, whats the hurry? Yeah, a scientist wants to be first to ID a bug on mars, but we are getting there eventually anyway... why spend extra money on scientific fluff, spend it colonizing mars...

Science is hard work that funders, dominated by private industry, is willing to pay to get access to new knowledge and technology. The haste is because the involved experiments are getting old - people live only that long - and because return on investment is larger the faster it happens.

Re the astrobiology, it is unlikely that any organism would be caught in the samples, you have to wait for the 2m ExoMars drill for that to happen. (IT won't return samples, but could identify living organisms that could live in subcrustal conditions.*) What Perseverance could return is understanding of the habitability and possibly trace fossils indicating possible life when Mars was younger.

*If not below the 2 m of radiation sterilized rock, so a couple of kilometers down. New research on potential Mars crust conditions has increased the prior likelihood by finding specifics:

"Our findings indicate that Mars' crustal processes were far more dynamic than previously thought," said Lee, the Harry Carothers Wiess Professor of Geology and professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences.

"Not only could thick crust in the southern highlands have generated granitic magmas without plate tectonics, but it also created the thermal conditions for stable groundwater aquifers—reservoirs of liquid water—on a planet we've often considered dry and frozen."

https://phys.org/news/2024-12-ancient-mars-thick-crust-hidden.html

At an estimated 2 billion years old, Black Beauty is the second oldest Martian meteorite ever discovered. However, the Curtin University team discovered something even older within it: a 4.45 billion-year-old zircon grain that harbors the fingerprints of fluids rich in water.

Team member Aaron Cavosie from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences thinks this discovery will open up new avenues to understanding hydrothermal systems associated with the activity of volcanic magma that once ran through Mars.

"We used nano-scale geochemistry to detect elemental evidence of hot water on Mars 4.45 billion years ago," Cavosie said in a statement. "Hydrothermal systems were essential for the development of life on Earth, and our findings suggest Mars also had water, a key ingredient for habitable environments, during the earliest history of crust formation."

https://www.livescience.com/space/m...st-in-hot-water-on-mars-billions-of-years-ago
On Earth similar conditions led to the split between biology and geology, now robustly dated to ~ 4.4-4.2 billion years ago.

 

[George²]

Do you mean definitively answering the question mankind has been pondering since when we were living in caves & looked up at the sky

I remember when I lived in a cave and I looked up, I could see the ceiling of the cave.

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

Note: All missions sent to land on Mars are thoroughly sterilized so we don't introduce any microorganisms onto the planet or mistake Earth microbia for life present or past life native to the Red Planet.

Sorry to disappoint, but AFAIK complete sterilization attempts only happened with the Viking probes. Soviet (crash) landers before that was cleaned at best (probably not), and that goes for all subsequent missions chutes - vast square meters of textile hiding places - and insides as well.

There have been many possibilities of biological transfers to (and from) Mars, including billion of years of impact ejecta like Black Beauty described above. Though the harsh radiation environment of today's Mars cuts down on the transfer likelihood, and recent transfer should be possible to identify by sharing evolutionary traits (genome, specific proteins, et cetera).

The main reason to clean, including antibacterial cleaning agents where they can be used, is to prevent own organic contamination to foul up the analysis experiments. That could prevent, desensitize (cause false negatives) or cause false positives in an analysis.

Planetary protection concerns are moral, and we will see how that plays out. In any case our own fauna is at first worse adapted to subcrustal conditions than any extant fauna and could be outcompeted.

 

[danR]

Ah, yes. And I'm sure he'll begin building his Mars base with AI powered, self-replicating, Go-Go dancing robots at the same time. The base that should have been in operation 5 years ago.

Musk says a lot of things and habitually gives overly optimistic timelines. The next launch window is in 2026 and the following one is in 2028/2029. His company will have to demonstrate capability to design, build, and land multiple labs & rovers on the Moon before getting anywhere near Mars within those 4 years.

Sounds like you do not disagree with a <2040 date, then, which satisfies the constraints indicated in the article. As for ~2029, SpaceX has already demonstrated the ability to launch a Tesla to a cis-Martian flypast. It would be a delta-V energy stretch from that event to getting a automobile-sized mass on Martian soil; but it would be within the capabilities of an energy-scrounging booster&secondstage-sacrificed (no return) Starship, even without LEO refueling.

Note that SpaceX has already demonstrated launch-to-orbit capability for Starship, it was simply decided not to follow through.

 

[danR]

Back in 2018, he stated it would be likely SpaceX would send astronauts to Mars by 2024.

2018, a Falcon Heavy yeeted an automobile+final-stage mass towards Mars' orbit. Since an unmanned Starship that does not need to demonstrate LEO refueling and does not need to waste propellant returning either stage, the only real constraint for <2030 landing of an automated/remote-guided lab is getting an agreement with the package designers. The latter will be the only bottleneck. I would not say it's a wide bottleneck, but it's a constraint only I have added.

Before 2040, the project would be a slam-dunk. In any event, I fully expect SpaceX to land a Tesla-sized mass on Mars for their own reasons by 2028-29. Maybe a Tesla; because that's how they roll.

 

[orsobubu]

space missions, with their extreme constraints, are a perfect test bed to multiply the contradictions of the capitalistic system on earth; i cannot describe with words how incredibly stupid is a space race between competing imperialisms; internationalism is the only logical solution, any other roadmap will necessarily end badly.