NASA Has Collected Its First Mars SAMPLE. but It Needs $4 Billion, 10 Years, and New Technology to Bring the Rock to Earth

Alexander Dallendorfer                                                                                                         9/17/21

Ippolito Period C Chemistry                                                                                   Current Event #1

Citations:

McFall-Johnsen, Morgan. “NASA Has Collected Its First Mars SAMPLE. but It Needs $4 Billion, 10 Years, and New Technology to Bring the Rock to Earth.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 8 Sept. 2021, www.businessinsider.com/nasa-plan-to-bring-perseverance-rover-mars-samples-to-earth-2021-9. 

NASA has collected its first Mars sample. but it Needs $4 billion, 10 years, and new technology to bring the rock to earth.

By Morgan McFall-Johnsen

Business Insider

September 8, 2021

As reported in the September 8th, 2021 Business Insider article, “NASA has collected its first Mars sample. but it Needs $4 billion, 10 years, and new technology to bring the rock to earth.” by Morgan Mcfall-Johnsen discusses the challenges that face NASA’s plan to launch a mission to retrieve soil and rock samples from the Mars rover, Perseverance and return them to Earth in order to study them in the hope of possibly discovering evidence of ancient life on the Red Planet.

The article discusses the plan by both NASA and the ESA to launch a follow up mission to the Perseverance rover mission in order to retrieve rock samples and return them to the Earth. The author explains that “The rover's current location, a 28-mile-wide basin called Jezero Crater, is the ideal place to hunt for an answer. More than 3.5 billion years ago, a river spilled over the edge of the crater and filled it with water. That river very likely carried clay and minerals into the lake, which then fell to the bottom — possibly trapping microbes and enshrining them as fossils in sedimentary stone”. This means that Jezero Crater may have evidence in it of ancient life on Mars, this is one of the reasons NASA selected Jezero as Perserverences landing site. While landing a rover on Mars is one thing recovering samples from one is another, NASA’s current plan would take at least a decade, require technology that hasn’t been developed yet and a minimum of $4 Billion. Another sign of a possible eruption is the detection of acoustic signals linked to the movement of magma through the crust”. NASA’s current plan would be two separate launches, one carrying a lander and one carrying the orbiter. The lander would land as close as possible to the location of Perseverance’s samples, collect them and load them into the landers rocket. The rocket would then launch into Mars orbit which would be the first time anything has been launched from the surface of Mars. Then the rocket would dock with a larger craft, the orbiter which would return the samples to Earth. While the current timeline is sketchy, the author states that the current aim is “a 2028 launch and 2033 arrival Earth” and that the current estimated budget is “$3.8 billion to $4.4 billion” both of which have been estimated by an independent review board which has based this on the information that has been released by NASA.

The author, Morgan McFall-Johnsen makes sure that every piece of information is using only the facts and is up to date. She also makes sure to present the information in a way that gives us the full scope of what we know about this groundbreaking plan to retrieve samples from Mars and return them to the Earth. So in conclusion this article does a great job of discussing an important mission that may have consequences on science, politics, religion and more.