NASA's beleaguered Mars Sample Return program currently faces extreme costs of up to $11 billion and a timeline that could reach 2040. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an ...

NASA announced Friday that it will award contracts to seven companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, to study how to transport rock samples from Mars more cheaply back to Earth. The space agency ...

"The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive, and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long." When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

In July 2024, NASA’s Perseverance rover extracted a rock core from the edge of Neretva Vallis, a river valley cut into the Martian surface by water rushing into the Jezero Crater billions of years ago ...

This photomontage shows tubes containing samples from Mars, as collected by NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover. The agency’s Mars Sample Return Program plans to bring these samples back to study them in ...