"Perseverance, however, has spent its nearly five years on Mars focused on a very different mission. Instead of collecting trash Perseverance has roamed the Red Planet collecting rock samples, with the goal, in part, of finding potential evidence of life on Mars. The plan is to send the samples back to Earth, where they'd undergo further study. But that project, known as Mars Sample Return, is hanging on by a thread."
"You know, back to the 1990s, even back to the 1960s, if you look back on it. And the whole core idea is: we can study rocks better here on Earth than we can on Mars because it's hard to lift or build a huge wet lab on another planet ... It's easier to bring smaller little bits of stuff back"
Perseverance launched in 2020 and landed on Mars in early 2021 as a follow-up to Curiosity. The rover has spent nearly five years collecting Martian rock samples intended to search for potential evidence of past life. The collected cores are part of a multi-decade Mars Sample Return effort designed to return small rock and regolith samples to Earth for comprehensive laboratory analysis. Terrestrial labs enable more powerful, flexible, and contamination-controlled tests than are feasible on Mars. The Mars Sample Return campaign currently faces significant technical, programmatic, and schedule risks that imperil plans to bring samples home.
Read at www.scientificamerican.com
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