The future of NASA’s next flagship mission to Mars has been put in doubt following a scathing report from the agency’s Independent Review Board. It concludes that the Mars Sample Return mission, which is set to be launch in 2028, faces a series of technical problems, a runaway budget as well as a dubious launch timetable.
NASA and its collaborator on the project — the European Space Agency – regard the mission as a “critical next step” in plans to explore Mars. Part of that plan involves NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which landed on Mars in 2020. It has already collected a series of Martian samples and deposited them on the surface. They would then be collected by a separate mission – the MSR – and returned to Earth.
With an original price tag of $4bn, the MSR’s cost has risen to an estimated $5.3bn. The review board report identifies problematic issues in the promotion, organization, scheduling and financing of the mission.
“MSR was established with an unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning,” the report states. “As a result, there is currently no credible, congruent technical, nor properly margined schedule, cost and technical baseline that can be accomplished with the likely available funding”.
Those issues, the report says, make launching the mission in 2028 “impossible”. Yet moving the launch to 2030, the next feasible launch window for Mars, would increase the mission’s cost to $8–11bn – a move that would put “extreme pressure” on the rest of NASA’s budget for planetary science.
An alternative option would be to use two landers to return the samples, instead of one, but this would extend the mission well into the 2030s and at the same high cost. The long road to Mars
The review board recommends that NASA examine the “entire management and organizational structure” for the mission to improve accountability. “Mars Sample Return is a very complex programme with multiple parallel developments, interfaces and complexities,” notes review chair Orlando Figueroa, who is a former director of Mars exploration at NASA.
The report also says that NASA must do “a much better job at engaging and communicating the importance of MSR” to the public.
NASA has now appointed a review team to respond to the review board’s findings. Led by deputy administrator for science Sandra Connelly, the team aims to publish a report next March. NASA has also decided in the meantime “to delay its plans to confirm the official mission cost and schedule”.
High impact
This is not the first time that the mission has come under fire. In July the US Senate Appropriations Committee noted it has “significant concerns” about the MSR’s technical challenges and the potential impact rising costs could have on other missions.
“If NASA is unable to provide the committee with a MSR lifecycle cost profile within the budget profile [of $5.3 billion],” the committee says, “NASA is directed to either provide options to de-scope or rework MSR or face mission cancellation.”
The mission also faces competition, with China setting out plans for a Mars sample return mission to launch around 2030.
