A potentially huge discovery by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover will likely remain in scientific limbo for years to come.
On Wednesday (Sept. 10), the Perseverance team announced it found possible biosignatures in pieces of a Mars rock called “Cheyava Falls” that the rover first studied last year. Those intriguing chemical fingerprints include the iron-containing minerals vivianite and greigite, which Perseverance spotted in the clay-rich sediments of a long-dry lakebed.
“The combination of these minerals, which appear to have formed by electron-transfer reactions between the sediment and organic matter, is a potential fingerprint for microbial life, which would use these reactions to produce energy for growth,” NASA officials said in a statement on Wednesday.
But ancient Red Planet microbes aren’t the only explanation for the vivianite and greigite; they can also form via geological processes, Perseverance team members stressed. And the rover alone likely won’t be able to tease out whether or not they truly are a sign of Mars life.
“We basically threw the entire rover science payload at this rock,” Katie Stack Morgan, Perseverance project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said during a press conference on Wednesday. “And so we’re pretty close to the limits of what the rover can do on the surface in terms of making progress on that particular question.”
NASA expected Perseverance to run into this wall, so they designed the mission as a sample-return effort: Since it touched down inside Mars’ 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer-wide) Jezero Crater in February 2021, the rover has been collecting Red Planet rock and dirt and sealing the samples up in cigar-sized tubes.
The plan has long been to haul about 30 of these tubes back to Earth, where they would be studied in far greater detail than Perseverance can achieve with its limited instrument suite — a point Stack Morgan brought up on Wednesday.
“The payload of the Perseverance rover was selected with a Mars sample-return effort in mind,” she said. “The idea was for our payload to get us just up to the ‘potential biosignature’ designation and have the rest of the story told by instruments here on Earth.”
But the prospects for getting that Mars material to our planet have grown dimmer over the past few years thanks to delays, cost overruns, project redesigns and budget decisions.
The original plan was a joint NASA-European Space Agency campaign with a total maximum price tag of around $3 billion (as estimated in July 2020). The goal was to get Perseverance’s collected material to Earth by 2033.
By 2023, however, the projected cost of Mars Sample Return (MSR) had ballooned to between $8 billion and $11 billion, and the samples’ expected arrival on Earth had slipped to 2040 or so.
This was unacceptable to the top NASA brass. In April 2024, Bill Nelson, the agency’s chief at the time, announced NASA would overhaul the MSR strategy after incorporating new ideas proposed by agency research centers, academia and private industry.
By early January of this year, NASA had narrowed its options down to two potential architectures. One would use an agency-developed “sky crane” to get the MSR lander down on Mars, while the other would rely on a commercially provided landing system. (The MSR lander would sport a rocket that launches Perseverance’s samples off the Red Planet’s surface.)
Option 1 would likely cost between $6.6 billion and $7.7 billion, while Option 2 would be slightly cheaper, falling between $5.8 billion and $7.1 billion. Both could end up getting the samples to Earth by 2035, if all goes according to plan, Nelson said.
NASA planned to choose between these two alternatives by mid-2026 — but that does not appear to be in the cards anymore.
President Donald Trump’s proposed 2026 federal budget slashes NASA’s overall funding by 24% next year and reduces the agency’s science funding by nearly half. Those cuts, if enacted, will result in the cancellation of dozens of missions — including Mars Sample Return.
However, that doesn’t mean Perseverance’s samples will be stuck on the Red Planet forever, NASA Acting Administrator Sean Duffy said during Wednesday’s Perseverance press conference.
“Because we care about resources and we care about the time frame, we believe there’s a better way to do this, a faster way to get these samples back, and so that is the analysis that we’ve gone through,” Duffy said. “Can we do it faster? Can we do it cheaper? And we think we can.”
He didn’t provide details about these better options during the press conference. It’s worth noting, however, that both Rocket Lab and Lockheed Martin have proposed cost-efficient private MSR missions. And SpaceX would certainly offer the services of its Starship megarocket, which the company is developing to help humanity settle Mars, among other tasks.
Speed may be of the essence to Duffy and other Trump administration officials, who have said the U.S. intends to land astronauts on the moon again before China does. There is also an MSR race afoot, as China plans to launch its Tianwen 3 mission to the Red Planet in 2028 and get its collected samples home as soon as 2031.
Source link
