Brain teaser
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The American space agency is seeking to repatriate the samples collected by Perseverance, the mobile minilaboratory present on Mars since 2021. An ambitious and extremely expensive project while funding is lacking.
We sow stones on Mars like Tom Thumb, but will we one day pick them up to return home? The affair seems to be getting worse and worse. NASA announced this Monday, April 15 that it will completely review its copy for its Martian sample return project (the MSR mission, for Mars Sample Return in English), considered too expensive as it stands. The goodwill and good ideas that arise within the American agency, but also throughout the space industry, are welcome to reduce costs.
It’s been a little over three years since Perseverance, NASA’s latest Mars rover, landed on the red planet as part of the American Mars 2020 mission. This laboratory on wheels as big as a car (3 meters long, 2 meters high, 1 ton) tirelessly surveys the bottom of the Jezero crater, which housed a lake billions of years ago, studying the composition of the soil and rocks to find sediments, traces of the passage of the water, even signs of fossilized micro-organisms… As for the sediments, we are served. Perseverance has already made it possible to accumulate valuable data on the geology of the place. But for traces of fossil bacteria, we still have nothing to put into our mouths. If only life forms had
