NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) today unveiled the final architecture of their ambitious program to bring samples of Martian rock and soil back to Earth. One big change: instead of sending a new ESA-built “fetch rover” to help collect material in the 2030s, the Mars Sample Return mission will plan to deliver directly from NASA’s existing Perseverance rover, which has been on the planet since the beginning. 2021. The lander designed to send the samples home will carry two small backup helicopters based on the successful Ingenuity, which currently conducts Mars forays that could collect samples if Perseverance fails.
“The reliability and life expectancy of Perseverance … means we are confident it will be able to deliver samples to the exit vehicle in 2030,” Jeff Gramling, director of the Mars Sample Return program, said at a briefing today. Confidence that Perseverance would be up to the task was boosted by the performance of its older sibling, Curiosity. This rover is approaching its 10th anniversary on Mars and is still going strong. Planners are also now optimistic that the helicopters are a reliable backup for the demonstration return mission. NASA sent the Ingenuity helicopter to Mars with Perseverance as a technology demonstration, and it made 29 flights and lasted more than a year longer than expected. Using helicopters as a tool “has moved into the realm of the possible,” says NASA science chief Thomas Zurbuchen. “That’s why we do technology demos.”
This new plan will get NASA and ESA out of the technical hole. Feasibility studies earlier this year suggested that adding a rover would make NASA’s 2030 lander too heavy to land safely. So the rover would have to be sent in a separate spacecraft with its own landing system. This would increase the cost of the mission, originally estimated at about $7 billion. “One lander is cheaper than two,” Gramling said. Aside from Perseverance’s improved role and added helicopters, the mission is otherwise as previously advertised. “The Mars Sample Return is happening as we speak,” Zurbuchen says, referring to Perseverance, which has already collected samples of 11 different rock types from Crater Lake. Each sample was divided into two pencil-sized tubes. One will stay with the rover, the other will be stored in a depot on the ground as a “safety net,” Zurbuchen says. The rover will continue collecting samples until it has about 30, the total number that can be transported back to Earth.
In 2030, if all goes according to plan, NASA’s lander will land near where Perseverance is working. The rover will arrive at the lander and the ESA robotic arm will remove the tubes one by one and place them in a spherical container about the size of a basketball. In early 2031, a rocket on a lander will launch the container into Mars orbit, where an ESA-built reentry craft will pick it up, enclose it in several layers of shielding for safety, and then head home. In 2033, a saucer-shaped descent module will carry samples down into the Utah desert.
If Perseverance runs into trouble during its 9-year wait for society, controllers can instruct it to dump its cargo of sample tubes on the ground to create a second warehouse. When that happens, helicopters come into play: they can fly up to 700 meters, land next to a sample tube – each weighing up to 150 grams – and roll over the tube with wheels on the underside of their legs to lift it up. with a grapple. Returning to the lander, he drops the tubes to the ground to be picked up by his arms. If Perseverance fails completely and can’t drop its payload — “worst-case scenario,” says Richard Cooke of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory — the lander will stop near the first storage facility in Crater Lake and return with those samples.
For more read: https://www.science.org/content/article/scrapping-original-plan-mars-mission-existing-rover-bring-samples-home
