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In a newly released report, an independent group of scientists and space policy experts from NASA and the European Space Agency gave the green light for a campaign to return samples of Mars.
“Full steam ahead,” Maria Zuber, a member of the Independent Review Board and Vice President of Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Tuesday during a conference call.
The Review Board reviewed the value of this mission as well as the risks and technical requirements of the campaign.
“We unanimously believe that NASA and ESA are now ready to conduct a return of the Mars samples and that the mission has extraordinary potential for shocking scientific discoveries,” said David Thompson, president of MSR IRB and retired president of Orbital. ATK.
“That said, we also recognize that the return of the Martian samples is also an extremely ambitious and technically demanding mission,” said Thompson.
To assist NASA in meeting these technical requirements, the audit committee made 44 recommendations to address potential issues related to mission scope and management, technical strategy, program and budget.
The return of the Mars champion will involve several advanced spacecraft, one of which, NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, is already about halfway to the Red Planet after launching earlier this year.
On Mars, Perseverance will begin the search for samples to be temporarily stored in the Jezero Crater.
Once sufficient valuable soil and rock samples have been collected from Mars, an ESA-supplied “Fetch” rover will retrieve the buffered samples and transfer them to a NASA-built Mars ascender vehicle that will orbit the samples around Mars.
The MAV vehicle will meet with an ESA-supplied Earth Return Orbiter, which will return the samples to Earth in a highly secure containment capsule.
NASA and ESA have announced their intention to launch the remaining Mars sample return vehicles by 2026, but in its latest report, the Independent Review Board recommended a less accelerated schedule.
“The IRB looked at time and cost issues from a variety of perspectives,” said Thompson. “We compared actual development times in the most similar programs we could find and concluded from these comparisons that the programs required to support launches in 2026 were significantly shorter than more recent similar programs, including the Mars 2020 and Mars programs. Curiosity.
Thompson and his colleagues on the Audit Committee see 2028 as a more realistic target for the upcoming Mars Sample Return launches.
The Audit Committee also noted that NASA will need about $ 1 billion more than its current budget estimates, an increase of about 30%.
Although the audit committee expressed a preference for a slightly delayed planned launch, committee members agreed that NASA and ESA should begin work immediately, focusing on building technological redundancies to allow engineers and their space systems to adapt to unforeseen challenges.
“Our recommendation is to identify potential challenges and start addressing them on the ground, to try and move forward as quickly as possible,” said Zuber.
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