NASA invites media for a briefing on the independent review committee’s report on the return of Mars

mars2020-sample-tubes.jpg

NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will store rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on the planet’s surface for future recovery missions, as seen in this illustration.

Credits: NASA / JPL-Caltech

NASA will host a media conference call on Tuesday, November 10 at 11:00 EST, to discuss the findings and recommendations of the agency’s commissioned independent committee report on NASA’s plans with ESA (European Space Agency) for a mission Mars Sample Return.

NASA established the Mars Sample Return (MSR) Independent Review Board (IRB) to evaluate the agency’s early concepts for an international partnership with ESA to return the first samples from another planet. The report will be published Tuesday 10 November at 9:00 am on the Agencys Reports and Transcripts webpage and includes the findings and recommendations of MSR’s IRBs and NASA responses.

During the conference call, NASA’s science leadership and MSR IRB members will discuss the IRB’s findings and recommendations for the agency’s MSR architecture and what next steps will be for NASA to pursue the ambitious effort to collect and return pristine samples from Mars to Earth.

The conference call audio will be broadcast live on:

https://www.nasa.gov/live

Participants in the briefing include:

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters

Jeffrey Gramling, director of the Mars Sample Return program, NASA headquarters

David Thompson, IRB president of MSR, retired president of Orbital ATK

Maria Zuber, member of the IRB MSR and chair of the permanent review board, vice president of research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Peter Theisinger, MSR IRB member, employed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory