Is Mars Sample Return in Jeopardy? - 94th How Do You KNOW? - Explore Alliance

Dr. Barth discusses the problems of the Mars Sample Return with costs soaring in the billions and delays that are unacceptable. Should NASA cancel the project that has so far been successful, or should we move forward despite the costs?

Since 1972, no human explorer has gone beyond low Earth orbit. While it took just seven years from the first manned lunar landing to placing a large craft on the Martian surface, the intervening fifty years have seen no manned missions beyond Earth orbit.

With manned Martian landings continuously "thirty years away," a robotic sample return mission seemed the answer.

Questions about the possibility of life on Mars have not gone away since the Viking lander missions from the mid-1970s. The Labeled Release experiments designed by Gilbert Levin and Patricia Straat discovered evidence for microbial life on Mars in 1976—results subsequently dismissed by NASA.

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