NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead

After years on life support, NASA’s plan to collect martian rocks and ferry them back to Earth has died. Yesterday, Congress released a compromise spending bill for the present financial year that backs the White House’s effort to kill the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program. Although the bill must be passed by both congressional chambers and signed into law, it effectively signals the end of MSR.

The decision leaves in limbo planetary scientists’ top research objective and abandons, at least for now, several dozen rock cores collected by the Perseverance rover in anticipation that a future mission would rocket them into space. “This is deeply disappointing,” says Victoria Hamilton, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute and chair of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group. “When we’ve got memos coming out saying we want to be the dominant power in space, I wonder how we leave something this ambitious behind.”