NASA Restarts Its Mars Sample Return Plan With a New PSRA Study

NASA has opened a new chapter in its long, troubled effort to bring pieces of Mars back to Earth. On 9 November 2026, Mars Exploration Program director Tiffany Morgan told a virtual meeting of the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) that the agency is starting a fresh study called the Perseverance Sample Retrieval Architecture, or PSRA. Its job is to produce impartial recommendations on how to collect the rock and soil tubes gathered by the Perseverance rover and deliver them safely to Earth. The news was first reported in detail by Space.com.

In short, NASA's Mars sample return plan is being rebuilt from the ground up. The PSRA team is due to start work in January 2027 and to report its recommendations in the winter of 2027 to 2028. Until then, the samples stay where they are: sealed in tubes on Mars, waiting for a ride home.

What is waiting on Mars

Perseverance landed in Jezero Crater in February 2021. Jezero was chosen because it once held a lake fed by a river, the kind of place where signs of ancient microbial life could have been preserved in mud and rock. Since landing, the rover has drilled cores, sealed them in pencil-sized titanium tubes and kept most of them on board. Between late 2022 and early 2023 it also left a backup set of ten tubes on the ground at a site called Three Forks, as insurance in case the rover itself could not deliver them later.

The rover keeps working hard. Earlier this month it set a record for the longest distance driven by any vehicle on another world, more than 28 miles (45 km). One of its samples, taken from a rock nicknamed Cheyava Falls, contains features that NASA described in 2025 as a potential biosignature: patterns that could have been made by life, though non-living chemistry may also explain them. Only laboratories on Earth can settle questions like that, which is why scientists care so much about getting the tubes back. You can read about another recent Mars puzzle in our report on possible volcanic activity at Alba Mons.

Why NASA is starting over

The original Mars Sample Return campaign, planned jointly with the European Space Agency, needed several pieces of hardware: a lander, a small rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle to throw the samples into Mars orbit, and an Earth Return Orbiter to catch them and fly them home. The idea was elegant on paper but very expensive in practice.

Independent reviews put the bill at around 11 billion dollars, with samples not reaching Earth until about 2040. NASA itself judged that too costly and too slow. Another review group later argued the job could be done for roughly 8 billion dollars, with samples back as early as 2035. Since then the programme has been squeezed by budget pressure, and its future has been openly debated. NASA's Mars Sample Return mission page still describes the science goals, but the hardware plan is now back on the table.

What the PSRA team will look at

According to the details shared at the MEPAG meeting, PSRA will start from a clean sheet. The team will assess the requirements for a retrieval mission, look at lessons from earlier studies, weigh the technical options available today and consider different ways to buy the hardware, including commercial partners. That last point matters. In recent years NASA has leaned on companies for cargo, crew and lunar landers, and a commercially supplied sample-return mission could be one of the options on the table.

Questions the study is likely to face include whether a lander should pick up the tubes directly from Perseverance, whether helicopters could ferry tubes from the Three Forks depot, how big the Mars Ascent Vehicle needs to be, and how to protect Earth's biosphere when the samples arrive. None of these answers has been published yet, and NASA has not set a new return date.

A race with China

NASA is not alone. China's Tianwen-3 mission is expected to launch around 2028 on two Long March 5 rockets from the Wenchang launch site, with the aim of bringing Martian samples to Earth around 2031. If that schedule holds, China could become the first country to return material from Mars, even though NASA's rover has already done years of careful sample selection on the surface. China's planetary programme is moving on several fronts at once, as our report on its crewed Moon landing plan shows.

The two efforts are very different. Tianwen-3 is designed as a fast "grab and go" mission at a site of China's choosing, while Perseverance's samples come from a carefully mapped ancient lake bed. Scientists on both sides would gain from having both sets of samples in labs on Earth.

Why the samples are so hard to bring home

Bringing anything back from Mars means launching off another planet for the first time. Mars has about 38 percent of Earth's gravity and a thin atmosphere, but a rocket still has to reach about 3.5 km per second to get into orbit. Every kilogram of that rocket must first be landed safely on the surface. Then the samples have to be caught in orbit, flown across tens of millions of kilometres and dropped into Earth's atmosphere in a capsule tough enough to survive a hard landing without cracking open.

Distance makes all of this harder. Radio signals between Earth and Mars take anywhere from about 3 to 22 minutes each way, so the robots must work largely on their own. You can see how that delay changes as the planets move with our light-travel time calculator, and follow where Mars sits right now on the live solar system map.

Where to see Mars this week

If the news makes you want to look at the Red Planet yourself, now is a good time. Mars is in the pre-dawn sky and passes close to Jupiter on 15 and 16 November, a pairing that is easy to spot with the naked eye before sunrise. Our planets visible tonight page shows rise times and directions for your location. NASA's other Mars missions are busy too: the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft are heading for Mars after their Earth flybys, as we reported in our ESCAPADE flyby story.

What happens next

For now, NASA's Mars sample return plan is a study rather than a mission. The PSRA team begins in January 2027, its recommendations are due by early 2028, and only after that will NASA and Congress decide what to build and how to pay for it. The tubes on Mars can wait; they were sealed to last. The bigger question is whether the first Martian rocks to reach Earth will arrive on an American or a Chinese spacecraft.