NASA and European Space Agency will collaborate to bring samples of Mars to Earth

[Juppitèr]

NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) will coordinate in different missions to Mars to try to bring to Earth samples of the surface of the red planet, according to an agreement signed by both agencies today in Berlin.

It would be that the two missions already planned for Mars by NASA -Mars Rover, in 2020- and the ESA -ExoMars Rover, in 2021- collected samples, which would later be loaded into a small rocket that would be launched to be in orbit of the planet with a ship sent from Earth, on a date to be defined.

A launch from Mars that has never been done before, as highlighted in an ESA statement, which states that the ship sent from Earth would orbit Mars until it can collect the samples transported by the rocket.

He would then return to the United States, where material from the red planet would be quarantined before being analyzed by a team of international scientists.

Representatives from both agencies signed a declaration of intent today at the ILA, a key fair of the aeronautical sector that takes place in Berlin in parallel to a conference on the objectives and possibilities of an eventual mission of Return of Samples of Mars (MSR), a initiative that could provide key information about the red planet.

"Rebuilding the History of Mars and answering questions about its past are just two of the areas of discovery that would advance dramatically with such a mission," ESA's Director of Human Exploration and Robotics, David Parker, said in a statement. .

While the associate administrator of the scientific mission of NASA, Thomas Zurbuchen, said he can imagine "many scenarios" in which "the samples" are "critical" for the form of human exploration and described the bet as a first step towards the exploration of the neighboring planet.

According to the scientists, after the analysis of Martian meteorites and several missions to Mars, the logical evolution is an operation that collects samples from its surface and sends them to Earth.

These materials could be studied on Earth with a series of instruments that, due to their large size or high energy consumption, is technically complex to send a planet to 55 million kilometers.

The results of the studies of this whole project will be presented in the ministerial council of the ESA of 2019 to decide the further development of the missions.

NASA and ESA signed an agreement in 2009 to collaborate in the exploration of Mars - which included the recovery of samples in the next decade - but the project was canceled in 2011 by the US agency after a budget adjustment.