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

Despite a new emphasis on a streamlined, “lean” sample return architecture, a NASA official says it’s unlikely that suite of missions will be able to return Martian rock and soil samples to the Earth before the end of the 2020s.

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...