Nasa: 'New plan needed to return rocks from Mars'

NASA. Returning Mars samples is an immensely complex undertaking that will take years.

The quest to return rock samples from Mars to Earth to see if they contain traces of past life is going to go through a major overhaul.

Nasa now acknowledges the way it's going about achieving the samples' return is simply unrealistic in the present fiscal environment.

"The bottom line is that $11bn is too expensive, and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long," Nasa administrator Bill Nelson told reporters in a Monday teleconference.

The present architecture is already in play, in the sense that the rock samples to be returned home are in the process of being collected and catalogued on Mars today by Nasa's Perseverance rover.

"We are looking at out-of-the-box possibilities that could return the samples earlier and at a lower cost," said Dr Nicola Fox, the director of Nasa's science directorate.

It's likely Europe's significant contribution - the Earth Return Orbiter - will still be launched, albeit at a slightly later date than currently envisaged, possibly in 2030.Dr Orson Sutherland, Esa's Mars exploration group leader, said his organisation would meticulously review Nasa's response plan.

Mr Nelson emphasised that Nasa remained totally committed to MSR.It needed to fit within a sustainable budget envelope, which he described as somewhere between $5bn and $7bn. NASA/JPL-Caltech.

"Right now onboard Perseverance, we're carrying three samples of silica and carbonate-cemented rocks, and on Earth, both of those minerals can be fantastic for preserving ancient signatures of life," she told BBC News."We think it's possible that some of the samples are sandstones laid down in the ancient lake, but are still evaluating other origins as well. Either way, these rocks are the exact types of samples that we came to Mars to find, and we very much want to get them back to our labs on Earth."

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