Mars Ascent Vehicle
The Mars Ascent Vehicle, seen here in an earlier NASA design, will launch from the surface of Mars to place samples collected by the Perseverance rover into orbit.

NASA has selected Lockheed Martin to build a small rocket that will transport samples collected by the Perseverance rover into orbit around Mars.

This post is only available to members.

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...