Years in the making, NASA in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA) have been intently plotting out plans to send future spacecraft to Mars and bring bits and pieces and a whiff of atmosphere to Earth for rigorous inspection by state-of-the-art equipment.
Those collectibles may well hold signs of past life on that enigmatic, dusty and foreboding world.
Perseverance rover deposits select rock and soil samples in sealed tubes on Mars’s surface for future mission to retrieve and bring them to Earth for detailed study.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
But President Trump’s Fiscal Year 2026 proposed budget blueprint issued on May 2 is a projected budget bombshell for NASA, one that takes the life out of the Mars Sample Return (MSR) venture.
In fact, MSR is tagged in the White House budget numbers as “grossly over budget and whose goals would be achieved by human missions to Mars,” explaining that MSR is not scheduled to return samples until the 2030s.
MSR advocates are crying foul. Now what?
Go to my new Space.com story – “Trump’s 2026 budget plan would cancel NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission. Experts say that’s a ‘major step back’” – at: