NASA has unveiled a draft strategy for long-term robotic exploration of Mars that emphasizes low-cost missions and potential commercial partnerships.
At a meeting of two committees of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board March 29, Eric Ianson, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters, outlined a plan for a steady cadence of missions after Mars Sample Return that would advance science and refresh the infrastructure needed to support other missions.
“We wanted to look two decades into the future as far as what are the things that we can do to create equally dramatic and profound science” as Mars Sample Return, he said. “What we’re proposing to do here is to do it at lower cost and a higher cadence of missions.”
That strategy, called “Exploring Mars Together” by NASA, is intended to create what Ianson called a “sustainable” series of missions to Mars after the remaining elements of Mars Sample Return, the NASA-led Sample Retrieval Lander and European-led Earth Return Orbiter, launch in the late 2020s. NASA currently has no other robotic Mars missions in development other than ESCAPADE, a smallsat mission scheduled to launch in late 2024.
“Historically we’ve had peaks and valleys in the Mars program. When we talk about sustainable, it’s something that can be constant throughout,” he said. “We want to try and maintain missions on a regular cadence.”
That means launching relatively low-cost missions during every opportunity, which opens about once every two years. An “aspirational” timeline Ianson showed at the meeting had the first such mission launching in the early 2030s, moving into that regular cadence by the middle of the decade.
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