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Copernical Team
NASA's Webb identifies the earliest strands of the cosmic web
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A surprise chemical find by ALMA may help detect and confirm protoplanets
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Up up up and finally over: Sols 3873-3875
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ISRO's Chandrayaan-3 Set for Mid-July Launch, Reveals ISRO Chief
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Gullies on Mars could have been formed by recent periods of liquid meltwater
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Long history and bright future of space sample deliveries
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SpaceX Dragon begins return to Earth with experiments, samples from ISS
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Virgin Galactic finally takes its first paying customers to space
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The Mars Sample Return mission is starting to look expensive
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Getting to space is hard. It's even more hard to do new and interesting things in space. And when projects get hard, that usually means they cost more money. That is certainly the case for one of the most anticipated missions on NASA's current docket—the Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission. And it's not looking like it's going to get any easier anytime soon.
A recent report from Casey Dreier, the Planetary Society's Chief of Space Policy, looks at some of the challenges the mission faces. Arguably, the mission itself has already started, with Perseverance busily capturing, analyzing, and then dropping off samples to be returned to the laboratories on Earth. But three other main mission components still need to be completed for those samples ever to see the light of day (or the light of a sealed laboratory chamber) on Earth.
NASA is responsible for two of those components—the Sample Return Lander (SLR) and the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV). Each is appropriately named, as the SLR is designed to land, collect the samples that Perseverance has been collecting, and then return them to the MAV.
Italian researchers reach the edge of space flying aboard Virgin Galactic's rocket-powered plane
