NASA has continued its work on a new and quite innovative project that will be the first of its kind. It plans to launch a rocket from the surface of another planet in order to allow research samples to be sent back to Earth directly from Mars.
This massive undertaking will make use of NASA’s Perseverance Rover, which is still currently active on Mars, in combination with a brand new Lockheed Martin-designed Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) and NASA Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL) that will work together in order to allow samples from the Red Planet to make it back to Earth.
“The MAV, which is being developed by Lockheed Martin Space of Littleton, Colorado, will be packaged with NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL), another big part of the sample return campaign,” read a recent report, posted Wednesday morning, via Space.com.
“The two-in-one spacecraft — MAV and SRL — will touch down near or in Jezero Crater, the spot where NASA’s Perseverance rover is already busily gathering Mars samples. A second lander, carrying a European Space Agency (ESA) ‘fetch rover,’ will touch down in the same area as well,” it stated.
The new project is slated to include the to-be-shipped samples from the Perseverance Rover being loaded into the MAV and then flown all the way back to Earth. If this works as planned, the samples will end up landing out in the Utah desert in the year 2033.
The Lockheed Martin MAV system comes with a six-year contract sporting $194 million, as stated by the report. As of writing, the plan is for the project to launch out of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the year 2028.
The MAV itself sits at just under 10 feet in height and just 1.5 feet in diameter. The rocket design also includes space for roughly 30 sample tubes coming from Mars that will be sent back to Earth at almost 9,000 miles per hour.
Lockheed Martin’s senior program manager for the Mars Ascent Vehicle Integrated System (MAVIS), Steve Sides, unveiled a bit of the overall complexity and potential impact of the entire project.
“We’ve never launched a rocket from Mars, so there’s a lot of technology involved here,” Sides claimed. “But we’re also going to get a lot of science from those Mars samples.”
NASA also made sure to highlight the extreme importance of the MAV project back during its announcement in February when it come to the project with Lockheed Martin Space.
“This groundbreaking endeavor is destined to inspire the world when the first robotic round-trip mission retrieves a sample from another planet – a significant step that will ultimately help send the first astronauts to Mars,” exclaimed Bill Nelson, an administrator for NASA. “America’s investment in our Mars Sample Return program will fulfill a top priority planetary science goal and demonstrate our commitment to global partnerships, ensuring NASA remains a leader in exploration and discovery.”
The associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters, Thomas Zurbuchen, also spoke out about the importance of this new mission targeting Mars.
“Committing to the Mars Ascent Vehicle represents an early and concrete step to hammer out the details of this ambitious project not just to land on Mars, but to take off from it,” claimed Zurbuchen. “We are nearing the end of the conceptual phase for this Mars Sample Return mission, and the pieces are coming together to bring home the first samples from another planet. Once on Earth, they can be studied by state-of-the-art tools too complex to transport into space.”