LITTLETON, Colo. (KDVR) — For the first time in human history, we will be able to closely analyze materials on Mars to better understand the red planet, and a Colorado company will play a pivotal role in that mission.
Lockheed Martin was selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to be a major player in the mission, awarding it three contracts.
The contracts are for steering the rocket to Mars over 26 months, building and launching the rocket to bring samples back and returning those samples to Earth unscathed.
“This is a really exciting mission,” said Dave Murrow with Lockheed Martin’s Deep Space Exploration team. “We’ve launched a lot of things from the surface of the Earth before, starting in the ’50s, but this will be the first time that we’ve launched something from the surface of Mars.”
The Perseverance Rover has been roaming Mars for about a year now and has been collecting samples to place in tubes. Murrow said those tubes will be loaded in a nose cone of a rocket, or Mars Ascent Vehicle. The MAV will be launched from the surface and will go into orbit and be picked up by a spacecraft built by the European Space Agency.
“Launching something from the Earth and launching something from Mars on one level is pretty similar,” Murrow said. “At another level though, it’s at a place where you can’t actually see it. You have to do these things autonomously so you can tell from the telemetry that comes back to the Earth whether or not the MAV is in the right position to be fired.”
Previous missions are giving engineers some practice, even if this Mars mission is unprecedented. Murrow said expeditions like landing on Mars and bringing back samples from missions like OSIRIS-REx and Stardust give a critical perspective, like pieces to a puzzle.
“It’s the sum of a lot of little, small parts, each of which we know how to do very, very well,” Murrow said. “Putting those parts together, that’s the hard part. That’s the fun part.”
Once the launch is complete, and the sample handoff to the European Space Agency ship is done, the samples will come back to Earth through a lightweight capsule that has been designed with special thermal protective material, so the samples aren’t damaged.
Lockheed Martin has had a lot of experience in designing and developing these capsules, through previous missions including Genesis, Stardust and OSIRIS-REx. The samples will touch down in Utah in 2033.
“We don’t think that there’s any life on Mars now, but there are conditions that we can see with our remote sensing data, that water was on Mars,” Murrow said. “Water still exists on Mars below the surface in ice, and at some point in Mars history, there may have been life.”
By bringing back these samples and sharing them with the scientific community across the country and the world, Murrow said we may learn the answer to that question.