Source: Spaceflight Now
Scientists are proposing splitting an ambitious multibillion-dollar mission to return samples from Mars into three pieces to ease budget concerns, officials said this week.
Speaking to reporters from an astrobiology conference in Houston, researchers said the next round of robotic missions to explore the solar system will be better equipped to hunt for past or present life.
The holy grail of those missions is a project to collect soil samples from Mars and return them to Earth. Officials did not disclose a predicted cost for the mission, but it will be expensive enough to warrant a joint endeavor between NASA and the European Space Agency.
A joint Mars exploration initiative finalized last year between NASA and ESA calls for a cooperative sample return mission some time in the 2020s. The sample return effort would follow joint orbiters and landers launching in 2016, 2018 and 2020.
“It is a hellishly difficult mission,” said Steve Squyres, principal investigator of the Mars rovers now exploring the Red Planet. “It always has been and always will be. The difficulty is part of why it’s been 20 years in the future for the past 20 years.”
NASA and ESA are carefully planning the missions to search for potential concentrations of organic material, the building blocks of all life.
“That would be a really good finding on Mars because if we can find the organic matter, then we have a real reason to think that there might once have been life there,” said Bill Schopf, a researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Squyres is also chairman of the National Research Council’s Decadal Survey culling concepts for the next phase of planetary exploration. The NRC survey will recommend several missions to NASA next year.
The panel of independent scientists is considering 28 proposals, and many of the would-be probes will focus on the search for life or habitable conditions.
One of the concepts is a Mars sample return mission that would be divided into three separate missions to select, gather and launch material back to Earth.
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