I think the original plan was to land another rover, which would drive to each sample. I hope future plans weight the use of helicopters for retrieval after Ingenuity's success. It looks like the sample capsules weigh less than 3oz.

For better or worse it won’t be long until we get private exploration for minerals and water on the Moon and nearby planets, at a relatively decent scale (in comparative terms)

The James Webb Space Telescope had a $10 dollar price tag, why wasn't it considered too expensive at the time?

This article is nine months old.

Howtown had a video on this a few weeks ago:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvCgC1yA7_w

Has anyone seen broader reporting on the rest of the science budget?

My brother in law (JPL) was telling me about this earlier in August. Big letdown but he assured me that they'll come back to earth some day ... just gonna sit up there a long time.

Any news since January???

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this but one reason not to do this mission is that we have ~400 Martian samples from meteors found on Earth [1]. The fact that there's even 1 is kind of amazing to me. And this has been confirmed by multiple methods including analyzing the air bubbles trapped in the rock matching Mars's atmosphere.

Flying to Mars and then flying back is incredibly complicated and much more expensive. Rather than sending an exploratory rover or a satellite, you have to basically send an entire launch vehicle when we've never launched anything into orbit from Mars before. And it has to operate essentially autonomously (for the launch).

Even missions to get samples from comets and asteroids are far less complicated because you're not dropping into a gravity well with just enough atmosphere to cover all your stuff in dust but not enough for atmospheric braking. Mars has the exact wrong amount of atmosphere.

Obviously samples returned from Mars would be better but it diminishes the value when we already have samples here. So the huge price tag and incredible engineering complexity becomes harder to justify.

[1]: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/martian-meteorites-rare-visit...

don't boo, vote

I was holding my breath for Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope which amazingly wasn't cancelled but they did cancel its successor, the Habitable Worlds Observatory Space Telescope which would be able to spot earth-sized exo-planets

even though Congress already funded it, because somehow the executive is allowed to illegally pocket veto Congress over and over again past two years

it's all Heritage Foundation and Russell Vought, he has no use for science and education