Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

The Red Planet as seen by Europe’s Mars Express.
Image credit: ESA/D. O’Donnell – CC BY-SA IGO

For over four years, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has been on the prowl within Jezero Crater. Since its touchdown in February 2021, the car-sized robot has been dutifully gathering rock samples across the exploratory landscape. Some of those sealed specimens may well contain signs of past life on the dusty, foreboding Red Planet.

NASA in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA) have been steadfast in plotting out plans to send spacecraft to Mars and haul those Perseverance-plucked collectibles to Earth for close-up inspection in state-of-the-art facilities.

Image credit: NASA

But along with a 24.3% reduction to NASA’s top-line funding and slashing the space agency’s science budget by 47%, President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2026 proposed budget blueprint issued on May 2 by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has also taken the life out of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) venture.

This illustration shows an early concept for multiple robots that would team up to ferry to Earth samples collected from the Mars surface by NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

In a budgetary bombshell of a move, the NASA program has been cross-haired and cancelled, portrayed in the document as “grossly over budget and whose goals would be achieved by human missions to Mars.”

For details, go to my new Scientific American story – “NASA Spent Billions to Bring Rocks Back from Mars. Trump Wants to Leave Them There – After billions of dollars in spending and decades of planning, NASA may be forced to abandon precious samples of air, rock and soil on the Martian surface. Experts are furious” – go to:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-budget-calls-for-stranding-nasas-mars-samples-on-the-red-planet/