Wednesday 1st May 2024

    TradeBriefs Editorial

    From the Editor's Desk

    Can NASA's Mars Sample Return Program Be Saved? Some Experts Think So

    The Mars Sample Return (MSR), one of NASA’s most critical programs designed to bring pristinely sampled Mars rocks inside 30 titanium tubes to Earth, just hit a major roadblock.

    On Monday, NASA announced that the current MSR budget was too expensive, costing somewhere between $8 billion and $11 billion. To avoid budget cuts to other critical programs, like the Near-Earth Object (NEO) Asteroid Surveyor space telescope that could spot a rocky existential threat to our planet, NASA pushed the retrieval back until the 2040s. That’s a decade longer than the space agency’s initial timeline.

    Continued here


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