By 
April 30th, 2022
Credit: NASA
Bringing home the goods from Mars – what’s your view?
NASA and the European Space Agency are planning to use robotic Mars orbiter and lander missions to collect samples now being gathered by NASA’s Perseverance rover, busy at work on the Red Planet.
Perseverance rover deposits select rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on Mars’s surface for future missions to retrieve and bring back to Earth for detailed study.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
These samples, securely isolated inside an “Earth Entry System” using a layered “container within a container” approach, could be brought to Earth in the early 2030s.
The Earth Entry System would then be transported to a specialized MSR sample receiving facility.
NASA is requesting public comment on the scope of a Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the agency’s proposed Mars Sample Return (MSR) campaign.
Comments will be accepted through the mail and online through Monday, May 16, 2022.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA is also hosting two virtual public meetings about the proposed program at 3 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, May 4, 2022, and 8 p.m. on Thursday, May 5, 2022, at:
https://jpl.webex.com/meet/msr
Utah landing site
The public meetings will include briefings about the status of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process for the proposed program, as well as its purpose and scientific goals.
Meetings will also cover why the Utah Test and Training Range operated by the U.S. Air Force is the proposed landing site for the samples, and what planners are doing to ensure safe and secure return of the samples – a topic known as backward planetary protection.
NASA will consider all comments received during the scoping process in the subsequent development of the MSR Draft Environmental Impact Statement, which is currently scheduled to be released for public comment later this year.
Additional information on the agency’s National Environmental Policy Act process and the proposed NASA-ESA MSR program is available online.
Go to:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nepa-mars-sample-return-campaign/
For those people who have any comments to post in the Federal Register — pro/con regarding returning Martian samples directly to Earth — the comment period ends shortly.
Just hit the blue ‘Comment” button on the following document link below: National Environmental Policy Act; Mars Sample Return Campaign, at:
Posted in Space News
