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WASHINGTON – NASA will conduct an independent review of its overall efforts to return samples from Mars, looking to find any potential issues with the campaign while it was still in its early stages of development.
NASA announced on August 14 that it would establish an independent Mars Sample Return Review Panel to review the agency’s current plans to return samples from Mars, which began with the Mars 2020 mission. launched on July 30. The board will be chaired by David Thompson, the past president. Orbital ATK who retired shortly after the acquisition of his company by Northrop Grumman in 2018.
“This review will give us the opportunity to focus on the overall success of the mission and consider potential improvements that can be made early in the program to help ensure this outcome,” Thompson said in a NASA statement. .
Jeff Gramling, director of the Mars Sample Return program at NASA Headquarters, told an Aug. 17 meeting of NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee that Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA Associate Administrator for Science, asked independent review based on experience with similar reviews of other programs, including what is now known as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This mission, formerly known as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, received a similar review in 2017 as it faced cost overruns.
“The objectives of the review are to make sure we are on a technically sound basis to move forward, to review the concepts that have been developed to date, and also to review the cost and timing that we propose and make sure they agree that we have the right resources we need to do this job, ”said Gramling.
The independent review is expected to last eight weeks, with preliminary results reported to NASA after six weeks. Gramling said that in addition to the independent review committee, The Aerospace Corporation is conducting a cost and schedule review for the March sample return. Both reviews will support a review of the mission concept for the program, which has been moved from early August to mid-October so that it can incorporate the results of independent reviews.
In her presentation to the committee, Gramling did not suggest that any major changes were pending in the Mars sample return campaign. The Perseverance rover that March 2020 will deliver to the surface of Mars next February will cache samples of Martian rocks. A landing mission, slated to launch in 2026, will collect these samples, load them into a cartridge and launch it into Martian orbit. An Earth Return Orbiter, also launched in 2026, will grab the cartridge and send it back to Earth, landing in the Utah Desert in 2031.
The overall effort to return samples to Mars will likely cost more than $ 7 billion between NASA and the European Space Agency, which is partnering with the campaign. March 2020 cost $ 2.4 billion to build, plus $ 300 million for its first year of Martian operations. During a press conference on July 28, David Parker, director of human and robotic exploration at ESA, estimated that the Earth Return Orbiter that ESA will develop, as well as a small rover to “seek” for the NASA-led lander will cost 1.5 billion euros ($ 1.8 billion) over the next decade. Zurbuchen, at the same briefing, offered a “first estimate” for the cost of NASA’s role in these future missions at $ 2.5 to $ 3 billion.
This could make Mars Sample Return the most expensive Mars mission set yet. NASA’s twin Viking missions, which each had an orbiter and a lander, cost around $ 7.1 billion in 2020 dollars, according to a Planetary Society analysis.
This adds to the pressure to better understand the true cost of the mission campaign sooner rather than later. Gramling referred to lessons learned from the development of the Curiosity rover mission, which “suggested that we really get our hands around cost and schedule estimates early on.
“The main goals are to make sure that we are on a good footing for the future and that we have the resources we need to execute the mission and be successful,” he said.
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