Within a decade, a small rover on Mars will pick up samples of rock left by a previous mission. It will then load them into a rocket secured within a small platform on a flat patch of the planet’s surface. Once the rocket’s hatch has closed, the platform will toss it upward on its side, a bit like a thrown American football. The rocket’s engines will ignite, propelling it into Martian orbit—where a waiting spacecraft will grab its invaluable samples for ferrying back to Earth and into the hands of researchers eager to study them for signs of past life on the Red Planet. One might call this wild interplanetary shuffle the most epic game of catch ever conceived, but scientists simply refer to it as Mars Sample Return.
“It’s never been done before,” says Chris Chatellier of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), lead engineer of part of the launch system that will bring the samples back home. But it has been dreamed of—and planned—for decades.
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