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 plans to delay the next phase of its Mars Sample Return campaign and split a lander mission into two separate spacecraft to reduce the overall risk of the program.

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...