WASHINGTON – NASA will conduct an independent review of its overall efforts to return samples from Mars, seeking to find any issues with the campaign while they are still in the early stages of development.
NASA announced on August 14 that it will set up a Mars Sample Return Independent Review Board to examine the agency’s current plans to return samples from Mars, which began with the Mars 2020 mission launched on July 30. . The board will be chaired by David Thompson, the former president of Orbital ATK who retired shortly after his company was acquired in 2018 by Northrop Grumman.
“This assessment will give us the opportunity to focus on overall mission success and potential improvements that can be made early in the program to ensure that the outcome is,” Thompson said in a statement from NASA.
Jeff Gramling, program director of Mars Sample Return at NASA headquarters, said at an Aug. 17 meeting of NASA’s Planetary Science Advisory Committee that Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate director for science, requested the independent review based on experience with similar reviews of other programs, including what is now known as the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. That mission, formerly known as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, went through a similar review in 2017 when it had to do with cost overruns.
“The objectives of the review are to ensure that we are technically advanced, to review the concepts that have been developed so far, and also to look at the costs and scheme we are proposing and to make sure they agree that we have the right resources we need to do this job, ”Gramling said.
The independent review is scheduled to last eight weeks, with preliminary results to NASA informed after six weeks. Gramling said that, in addition to the independent assessment board, The Aerospace Corporation is conducting a cost and schedule evaluation for Mars Sample Return. Both reviews will support a mission draft review for the program, which was moved from early August to mid-October so that it can record the results of the independent reviews.
In his presentation to the commission, Gramling suggested that no major changes were made in anticipation of the Mars Sample Return campaign. The Perseverance rover that will deliver Mars to the surface of Mars next February 2020 will cache samples of Martian rocks. A lander mission, planned for launch in 2026, will collect these samples, load them into a canister and launch into Martian orbit. An Earth Return Orbiter, also launched in 2026, will pack the canister and return it to Earth, and land in the Utah desert in 2031.
The total Mars Sample Return effort is likely to cost more than $ 7 billion between NASA and the European Space Agency, which is participating in the campaign. March 2020 cost $ 2.4 billion to build, plus $ 300 million for its first Martian year of operations. At a July 28 press conference, David Parker, Director of Human and Robotic Exploration at ESA, estimates that the Earth Return Orbiter that ESA will develop, along with a small ‘fetch’ rover for the NASA-leading lander, will cost 1.5 billion euros. will ($ 1.8 billion) over the next decade. At the same briefing, Zurbuchen offered a ‘first whipping’ for the cost of NASA’s role in those future missions at $ 2.5-3 billion.
That could make Mars Sample Return the most expensive set of Mars missions to date. NASA’s twin Viking missions, each with an orbiter and lander, cost an estimated $ 7.1 billion by 2020, according to an analysis by The Planetary Society.
This is added to the pressure to better understand the real costs of the mission campaign as soon as possible. Gramling referred to lessons learned from the development of the Curiosity rover mission, which “suggests that we get our arms around estimates and schedules really early.”
“The primary objectives are to ensure that we move forward and that we have the resources we need to carry out the mission and be successful,” he said.
