NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover poses for a selfie after drilling a sample from Chiava Falls, the arrowhead-shaped rock in the center of this image. Image source: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Far away on desolate Mars, a collection of dust and rock samples awaits a journey that may never come.
After years of uncertainty, NASA’s pioneering Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, which was supposed to transport Martian material collected by the Perseverance rover to Earth, appears to have been cancelled. Earlier this week, a bipartisan group of US lawmakers approved a spending bill Which the MSR program focuses onWhich would have been the first mission to bring samples from Mars to Earth.
Mars rocks await a trip to Earth – can NASA deliver?
The demise of the mission did not come suddenly. The estimated cost of the ambitious project has ballooned, reaching US$11 billion in 2023, an amount similar to the cost of building the James Webb Space Telescope. Early last year, NASA admitted that it did not yet have a concrete plan to return Martian samples to Earth. The administration of US President Donald Trump has sought to cancel the MSR project and several other NASA scientific missions.
Fortunately for many scientists, the bill refunds the vast majority of NASA’s space science missions that the administration’s budget proposal mandates, such as the Habitable Worlds Observatory space telescope, which would search for signs of life on planets outside the solar system. As a result, the bill, which still requires Senate approval, “is ultimately a good bill for NASA science,” says Casey Dreyer, head of space policy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit in Pasadena, California.
But many scientists were disappointed by the fate of the MSR. “I was definitely disappointed to hear the news,” says Ryan Ogliori, a planetary scientist at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. “But I’m not surprised because of what we’ve heard over the last couple of years.”
When requested for comment, NASA did not respond before publication.
here nature He looks at the scientific opportunities that will be lost due to the cancellation of the program and the possibilities of reviving the mission.
Vital Signature Deal
Among the most exciting specimens collected by Perseverance is No. 25, taken from a rock called Chiava Falls. In September last year, NASA announced that the probe had discovered spots on the surface of the rock containing two chemical compounds, found on Earth around decomposing material and produced by certain microbial life.1. The researchers suggested that these compounds could be a fingerprint of ancient microbial life.
The Mars spacecraft is making an epic climb to explore some of the oldest rocks in the solar system
But these compounds can also be produced without the intervention of living organisms. As long as the Chiava Falls sample remains on Mars, scientists will not be able to fully analyze it to identify its origins. “This sample is worth several billion dollars, enabling it to answer this existential question that humans have been asking since the dawn of time,” Uglior says.