Hi listeners, Benjamin here. Welcome to the first episode of the Nature Briefing podcast. Now, if you heard the main Nature podcast on Wednesday, you'll know we're spinning the briefing chat section out into its own show, which will go live on a Friday. And we'll talk about a couple of stories that we've read in the Nature briefing, which is nature's daily roundup of the latest science stories. And talking with me today is Nick Petrich Howe. Nick, how you doing? I'm doing well, Ben. Thank you for having me on our first one of these briefing chat shows. I'm excited to get into it. Well, I'm excited too,

and we've got a couple of really great stories. First up, we've got a story, well, perhaps it's the

conclusion of a story, and it's about getting samples back from the surface of Mars to Earth. And this is a

story I read about in nature. So yeah, this is something we've been

talking about for a while in the podcast. Obviously, many scientists keen to get their hands on

this. How is it all going? Well, this is one of those stories that I think is perhaps not entirely

unexpected. It has to be said. But how it's gone over the last few years is, of course,

the Perseverance Rover has been rolling around the surface of Mars,

collecting rock samples since 2021. And as we covered on the show, I mean, it stored many of these

in its belly and also deposited some on the surface. And there are 40-something sample tubes,

Nick, most of which are filled with different types of rock. But the problem has always been...

How do we get them back? Yeah, they're a long, long way away, and how we get them back to Earth. A massively

ambitious project, and one that would be massively expensive. In 2023, we ran a story in nature

suggesting that it could cost $11 billion, which would be similar to the cost of

building the James Webb Space Telescope, the J-W-S-T. And about a year ago, NASA said, well,

we've got a couple of plans. We're investigating some paths to go down, way to save some money,

sort of kicking the can down the road. And that brings us to something that happened

last week. Okay. So what happened last week? Is the can finally hit the end of the road?

I think the can has struck the end of the road. So last week, a bipartisan group of U.S.

lawmakers passed a spending bill which axes the return program. And a lot of scientists, I think,

were obviously disappointed because there are, of course, a lot of questions that won't be

answered as a result of not having these rocks. Yeah, right. I can imagine that they're disappointed.

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