In an announcement made last Monday (15), NASA basically asked the industry for help to develop a credible plan to bring from Mars the samples that the Perseverance rover has been collecting since it began operations on the red planet in 2021. For some , is already a sign of a “soft cancellation” of the project, considered by the academic community to be one of the highest priorities of the American space agency.
On the ropes for a good two years, the current project, developed in partnership with ESA (European Space Agency), would involve a complex series of launches, sending a mothership into Mars orbit and a landing module equipped with a mini-helicopter and a rocket capable of inserting a capsule with samples into Martian orbit, where it would meet the mothership for return to Earth.
The small problem: the budget has already gone well beyond the original estimate, reaching US$11 billion. Furthermore, to spend all this money in the context of an agency that is experiencing expense cuts, it would only be possible to bring in the so-called samples so that they could be studied by scientists in 2040. For the current NASA administrator, Bill Nelson, it is money too much, too late. In contrast to this pessimistic perspective, the Chinese intend to have Martian rocks back on Earth in 2031, using a simpler architecture. It’s true, there won’t be many, nor will they be so well chosen. But they will come nine years earlier.
So what did NASA do? He held a press conference saying that he will review his plan and will also ask for suggestions from the American space industry on how to conduct the mission faster, for less money and with less complexity and risk. Easy. Only not.
In order not to make the effort unfeasible, the agency is lowering its requirements. With the new scope, ten of the sample tubes collected by Perservance would be enough. According to the original architecture, there would be 30. The scientific loss could be considerable. But will an alternative emerge capable of saving the mission? There are those who doubt it. According to Louis Friedman, co-founder and executive director emeritus of the NGO Planetary Society, the attitude practically marks NASA’s withdrawal from the project, despite the veneer given to the announcement. “In fact, the budget decision was made a couple of months ago and resulted in layoffs of much of the Mars sample return mission workforce,” he wrote in an article for SpaceNews.
The agency’s focus at the moment is clearly on returning to the Moon, a program that remains well financed, despite cuts in other projects. As a result, the US could lose a significant lead over China. The return of Martian samples is considered crucial for their potential to reveal whether or not there was indeed life in the red planet’s past. To date, studies of meteorites from there have been, at best, inconclusive.
Having visited a region of Mars where water was abundant in the remote past, Perseverance collected samples that, if they were from Earth, would have clearly preserved fossilized evidence of life. It remains to be seen whether they will ever have the chance to be closely analyzed by scientists.
This column is published on Mondays in printed versionin Folha Corrida.
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