NASA is calling on industry players to come up with an alternative plan to return rocky samples from Mars at a lower cost and an earlier date.
Hundreds of employees at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) will be affected by budget constraints looming over the space agency for the current year, with Congress still behind on issuing the final budget for 2024 and its final decision regarding Mars Sample Return (MSR).
NASA is scaling back on its ambitious Mars Sample Return (MSR) program, fearing federal budget cuts to the space agency’s plan to bring back rock and dust from the Red Planet, which has come under heavy scrutiny for having unrealistic costs and timelines.
NASA has announced a delay in its ambitious Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s moon Titan, moving the launch date to July 2028. This decision, driven by budget uncertainties, comes despite the mission successfully passing key design reviews. Worryingly, the space agency is delaying formal confirmation of the mission until…
Six California lawmakers wrote to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson last week to oppose the agency’s recent cuts to the Mars Sample Return mission, which aims to bring samples collected by the Perseverance rover on Mars to Earth.
NASA is pulling back from its Mars Sample Return program (MSR) in order to develop a revised way of bringing the Martian rocks back to Earth after its original plan was deemed unrealistic.
NASA is considering alternative ways to bring back samples from Mars after its budget and schedule for the sample return mission was deemed unrealistic in a recent report by an independent review board.
The findings from an independent review board suggest that NASA’s quest to return samples from Mars is riddled with challenges and seemingly impossible to accomplish under the current cost and schedule expectations.
NASA’s Perseverance rover has been diligently collecting rocky samples from Mars to stow them away on the planet’s dusty surface while engineers work to develop a rocket that can launch off of another world as a crucial step in the process of retr
The majority of the American public seems largely concerned with the threat of incoming asteroids, believing that NASA should prioritize the monitoring of rocky objects that could hit Earth over going to the Moon or Mars, according to a new survey.