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As you are reading this, an Earth spaceship carrying the Perseverance rover is on its way to the Red Planet. It should arrive in February 2021 and undertake missions never attempted before. Including storing samples of Mars so that a later mission can collect them and bring them back to our planet.
Called Sample Return, the mission is the joint work of NASA and its European counterpart, ESA. It should be operational by the end of the decade, with the platform landing on Mars from which a small ESA machine called the Sample Fetch Rover will depart in search of recipients left behind by Perseverance.
The mission is still in its early stages and NASA needed a second opinion on its plans. For this, he established the Mars Sample Return Independent Review Board for project evaluation. Last week, the results had arrived and the mission appears to have moved on, as NASA turned out to be “Ready to embark on its Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign to bring pristine samples from Mars to Earth for scientific studies.”
“NASA is committed to mission success and to addressing great challenges for the benefit of humanity, and one way to do this is to make sure we are ready to succeed as soon as possible.” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said in a statement.
“I thank the members of this council for the many hours of work that led to a very thorough review. We look forward to continuing mission planning and formulation in close cooperation with ESA. Ultimately, I believe this return example will be worth it and will help us answer the key questions of astrobiology on the Red Planet, taking us one step closer to our ultimate goal of sending humans to Mars. “
You can read more about the Mars Sample Return mission at this link. The board’s review of the mission is available here.
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