Mars ascent vehicle
An earlier concept for a Mars ascent vehicle, which would transport samples collected from the Martian surface into orbit. Those samples would be returned to Earth by another spacecraft. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The European Space Agency awarded two contracts to Airbus to study elements of a Mars sample return approach as the outlines of international cooperation with NASA on that effort materialize.

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Jeff Foust has more than a decade of experience writing about space policy, entrepreneurial ventures and regulatory affairs. In 2001, he established spacetoday.net to aggregate and summarize the day's space-related news stories. In 2003, he started The...