“I’m especially pleased that the goal is to bring back as many as 30 sample tubes as early as 2035,” she says. Those samples “will address fundamental questions for us as humans and ...

The science community has long identified a Mars Sample Return mission as the top priority for NASA's planetary science program. In the National Academies' most recent decadal survey released in ...

Option one would use the same "sky crane" landing system proven with NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance Mars rovers, a smaller sample collection spacecraft, a smaller rocket to boost the samples ...

NASA's beleaguered Mars Sample Return program currently faces extreme costs of up to $11 billion and a timeline that could reach 2040. The year 2025 isn't even a week old and NASA is already ...

The goal of the Mars Sample Return Program, which is being planned jointly with the European Space Agency (ESA), is to retrieve samples of rock, gas and loose surface material that were collected ...

Following months of deliberation, NASA has decided to pursue two alternative routes for its Mars Sample Return program, one of which elicits the help of the private industry. During a media ...

NASA leadership announced Jan. 7 that it would pursue studies of two architectures for its Mars Sample Return effort that would take samples currently being collected by the Perseverance rover and ...