![]() It will also presumably be less expensive, but Gramling did not provide any estimates of the cost savings. “We believe now that we have an architecture that is simpler and will position us for success.” It’s less organizationally complex,” he said. Gramling said eliminating the fetch rover and its lander would reduce the risk of the overall Mars Sample Return campaign. “There’s also the possibility we could do other things with it, such as observing the area around the lander and potentially taking pictures of the MAV launch.” “They would be used as a backup to bring the tubes back to the lander,” he said. ![]() ![]() The helicopters would then fly back to the lander and roll up to it. The wheels, he said, would allow the helicopters to land near a sample tube and then roll up to it to grab it. Each would be equipped with robotic arms to grapple sample tubes and have wheels on their landing legs. Richard Cook, manager of the Mars Sample Return program office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the new helicopters would be slightly heavier than Ingenuity. The helicopter was originally planned to conduct no more than five flights over a month, but has flown 29 times over more than a year. “We have confidence that the rover will be available to deliver samples to the sample retrieval lander in 2030, when we need it to be,” he said.Īs a backup, the lander will bring with it two helicopters similar to Ingenuity, the small helicopter delivered as part of the Perseverance mission and which far exceeded expectations. That assessment, along with the performance of the similar Curiosity rover, which will mark 10 years on Mars next month, led the agencies to conclude that Perseverance will be able to deliver samples to the lander. “Key to our new architecture is a recent assessment of Perseverance’s reliability and life expectancy based on its performance to date,” said Jeff Gramling, director of the Mars Sample Return program at NASA. An ESA-provided robotic arm will transfer the samples from Perseverance to the MAV. Instead, NASA and ESA will rely primarily on Perseverance to bring the samples to the lander with the MAV. The new concept, though, does away with the fetch rover and its lander. The two landers, NASA said then, were needed since a single lander that could carry both the MAV and the fetch rover had become too large to land using technologies demonstrated on previous landers. ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter would collect the sample package and return it to Earth in 2033. One would carry an ESA-provided “fetch rover” that would pick up samples cached by Perseverance and return them to the second lander, which contained the rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) that would launch the samples into orbit. ![]() In March, NASA said it would split a sample retrieval lander into two separate landers. WASHINGTON - NASA and the European Space Agency have revised their plans to return samples from Mars, removing a rover and its lander from the effort and replacing them with helicopters modeled on Ingenuity.Īt a July 27 briefing, officials with the two space agencies discussed the latest version of the planned Mars Sample Return campaign, with the goal of returning to Earth in 2033 samples currently being collected by the Perseverance rover. ![]()
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