B contract, before hitching lift back to Earth with ESA NASA says it needs until 2026 before making a final decision on how the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission will work.… During a briefing on ...

NASA recently deemed this situation unacceptable. In April 2024, agency chief Bill Nelson announced that an overhaul of the ...

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson left a final decision on a new mission architecture to the next NASA administrator working ...

NASA wants to return Mars samples to Earth, but budget problems and technical woes have the mission caught between a rock and the Red Planet. There appears to be an unofficial robotic space race ...

The year 2025 isn't even a week old and NASA is already gearing up for its first big announcement, this one about the agency's ambitious, yet beleaguered, Mars sample return mission. Today (Jan. 7 ...

The proposals present alternatives to the original Mars Sample Return program. Designed by NASA and the European Space Agency, the initial plan was deemed unwieldy after an independent review ...

"If they want to have a Mars sample return, which I can't imagine that they don't, I don't think we want the only sample return coming back on a Chinese spacecraft." He called a planned Chinese ...

There appears to be an unofficial robotic space race underway involving the Red Planet. Both the U.S. and China are scripting strategies for bringing goodies back to Earth from Mars via their ...