NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover will store rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on the planet’s surface for future missions to retrieve, as seen in this illustration.

NASA, along with the European Space Agency, is developing a campaign to return the Martian samples to Earth.

On September 1, NASA’s Perseverance rover unfurled its arm, placed a drill bit at the Martian surface, and drilled about 2 inches, or 6 centimeters, down to extract a rock core.

Mars Sample Return is a multi-mission campaign designed to retrieve the cores Perseverance will collect over the next several years.

“Returning a sample from Mars has been a priority for the planetary science community since the 1980s, and the potential opportunity to finally realize this goal has unleashed a torrent of creativity,” said Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA’s Mars Exploration Program based at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The benefit of analyzing samples back on Earth – rather than assigning the task to a rover on the Martian surface – is that scientists can use many kinds of cutting-edge lab technologies that are too big and too complex to send to Mars.

“I have dreamed of having Mars samples to analyze since I was a graduate student,” said Meenakshi Wadhwa, principal scientist for the Mars Sample Return program, which is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The first cored sample of Mars rock is visible (at center) inside a titanium sample collection tube in these images from the Sampling and Caching System Camera (known as CacheCam) of NASA’s Perseverance rover.

Mars Sample Return would involve several firsts aimed at settling an open question: Has life taken root anywhere in the solar system besides Earth.

Glavin is helping design systems to protect the Martian samples from contamination throughout their journey from Mars to Earth.

Collecting samples from Mars and bringing them back to Earth will be a historic undertaking that started with the launch of NASA’s Perseverance rover on July 30, 2020.

Being developed in collaboration with ESA (the European Space Agency), Mars Sample Return would require autonomously launching a rocket full of precious extraterrestrial cargo from the surface of Mars.

Engineers would need to ensure that the rocket’s trajectory aligns with that of a spacecraft orbiting Mars so the sample capsule could be transferred to the orbiter.

The orbiter would then return the sample capsule to Earth, where scientists would be waiting to safely contain it prior to transport to a secure biohazard facility, one that is under development now.

Keeping samples chemically pristine for rigorous study on Earth while subjecting their storage container to extreme sterilization measures to ensure nothing hazardous is delivered to Earth is a task that makes Mars Sample Return truly unprecedented.

Despite the low risk of bringing anything alive to Earth, an abundance of caution is driving NASA to take significant measures to ensure the Martian samples remain securely sealed throughout their journey.

A sample return campaign would include an ESA sample fetch rover that would launch from Earth later this decade to pick up these samples collected by Perseverance.

This illustration shows a concept for a set of future robots working together to ferry back samples from the surface of Mars collected by NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover.

The rocket would deliver the sample capsule to Martian orbit, where an ESA orbiter would be waiting to receive it.

This preparation would include sealing the sample capsule inside a clean container to trap any Martian material inside, sterilizing the seal, and using a robotic arm being developed at Goddard to place the sealed container into an Earth-entry capsule before the return trip to Earth.

To safely return a Martian sample to Earth, NASA is partnering not only with ESA, but also with at least 19 U.S.