NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover poses for a selfie after drilling a pattern from Cheyava Falls, the arrowhead-shaped rock within the centre of this image. Credit score: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Distant on desolate Mars, a set of mud and rock samples awaits a journey that may by no means come.
After years in limbo, NASA’s groundbreaking Mars Pattern Return (MSR) programme, which was speculated to ferry Martian materials collected by the Perseverance rover to Earth, appears set to be cancelled. Earlier this week, a bipartisan group of US lawmakers handed a spending invoice that axes the MSR programme, which might have been the primary mission to deliver Martian samples to Earth.
Mars rocks await a journey to Earth — can NASA ship?
The mission’s demise didn’t come out of the blue. The formidable undertaking’s estimated value has ballooned, reaching US$11 billion in 2023 — just like the quantity it value to construct the James Webb Area Telescope. And early final yr, NASA conceded that it nonetheless had no concrete plan to return the Martian samples to Earth. The administration of US President Donald Trump sought to cancel the MSR undertaking and plenty of different NASA science missions.
Fortunately for a lot of scientists, the invoice restores funding for the overwhelming majority of NASA area science missions that the administration’s funds proposal had positioned on the chopping block, such because the Liveable Worlds Observatory area telescope, which might seek for indicators of life on planets exterior the Photo voltaic System. Consequently, the invoice, which nonetheless requires Senate approval, “is in the end invoice for NASA science”, says Casey Dreier, chief of area coverage on the Planetary Society, a non-profit group in Pasadena, California.
However many scientists had been dissatisfied by MSR’s destiny. “I used to be definitely disheartened to listen to the information,” says Ryan Ogliore, a planetary scientist on the College of Central Florida in Orlando. “However I wasn’t stunned due to what we’d been listening to these final couple years.”
Requested for remark, NASA didn’t reply earlier than publication.
Right here Nature appears on the scientific alternatives that can be misplaced due to the programme’s cancellation and the prospects for a mission revival.
Biosignature cut price
Among the many most tantalizing samples collected by Perseverance is quantity 25, taken from a rock referred to as Cheyava Falls. In September final yr, NASA introduced that the rover had found spots on the floor of the rock that contained two chemical compounds, that are discovered on Earth round decaying matter and are produced by sure microbial life1. These compounds, researchers prompt, might be a fingerprint of historic microbial life.
Mars rover makes epic climb to discover among the oldest rocks within the Photo voltaic System
However, these compounds can be produced with out the involvement of residing issues. As long as the Cheyava Falls pattern stays on Mars, scientists can’t totally analyse it to study its origins. “That pattern is price a number of billion {dollars} with what it could possibly reply about this existential query people have been asking for the reason that daybreak of time,” says Ogliore.