00:00For years, NASA's Perseverance rover has been trudging around the surface of Mars
00:07collecting samples that were expected to be returned to Earth sometime in the relatively
00:11near future.
00:12However, the space agency now says it needs to go back to the drawing board with regards
00:16to getting that Martian material back to its scientists.
00:20So far, the rover has collected and stashed 24 samples, but they still need to be collected
00:24by a yet-to-be-launched Mars mission.
00:27NASA's original plan was to send two rockets to Mars, one of which would be the largest
00:31lander ever to touch down on the Red Planet, and the other would have remained in orbit.
00:35The lander would grab the samples, and a small rocket would then take off and then eject
00:39the samples towards the orbiter, which was then supposed to catch them and return to
00:42Earth.
00:43That project's cost has now increased astronomically, nearly tripling from the $4 billion initial
00:49proposal, and they say it could take until 2040 to get the samples back.
00:52ESA's Director of Space Exploration, David Parker, called the mission mind-bendingly
00:57complicated from the get-go, and he's not wrong.
00:59So how are they going to get them back now?
01:01Well, that's what NASA wants outside space exploration companies including SpaceX, Lockheed
01:06Martin and others to figure out.
01:08They announced that they will soon begin looking at bids for tried-and-true architectures to
01:12get those samples home as quickly and as cheaply as possible, adding that developing new technologies
01:17simply takes too much time.
01:22NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
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