NASA may be able to return samples from Mars without significant international cooperation, in part by eliminating stovepipes in the way it organizes for scientific and human space missions.
An advisory group set up after the Obama administration dropped plans earlier this year to collaborate with the European Space Agency (ESA) on a sample return effort found that lower-cost, less-capable missions are still possible, particularly if NASA’s space science and human exploration directorates work together more closely, using the agency’s Office of the Chief Technologist to develop hardware that serve the needs of both.
“Sending a mission to go to Mars and return a sample looks a lot like sending a crew to Mars and returning them safely,” says John Grunsfeld, the associate administrator for science.
Grunsfeld was reacting to a preliminary report by the Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG), which has been meeting since shortly after the NASA/ESA collaboration was scrapped in the U.S. fiscal 2013 budget request still pending on Capitol Hill. Headed by retired NASA “Mars czar” Orlando Figueroa, the panel of agency and outside scientists and engineers spent five months developing options for a U.S.-only mission that follows the sample-return priority set in the “decadal survey” of planetary scientists run by the National Research Council last year.
Briefing the NRC’s Space Studies Board Sept. 25, Figueroa presented robotic Mars options that could fly in the planetary launch windows in 2018, 2020 and 2022. With U.S. spending for the next mission to Mars limited to a Discovery-class mission capped at $800 million, Figueroa says there is probably no way to land another rover on Mars in the 2018 opportunity to identify and cache samples for eventual return.
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