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This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato.

And I'm Flora Lichten.

Today in the podcast, some bumps for a longstanding NASA mission.

The frustrating part is it's been a couple of years now that we've been trying to figure

out how to get this mission on the books.

We're talking about NASA's Mars sample return mission.

That's the ambitious project that aims to use the Perseverance rover

to collect Martian rocks and sand and even gulps of Martian air, and then through a complicated

handoff between different spacecraft, return those Martian samples back to Earth. In 2023,

a review board said that the original plan to bring

the samples back home would be much more expensive and take much longer than originally planned.

So this week, NASA announced two options on how to cut costs and bring the samples back to

Earth by the late 2030s. But the agency did not commit to a plan, leaving it to the next

administration to sort out. So is the mission on the rocks? Joining me now to get us up to speed is my

guest, Dr. Jim Bell, Professor of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University,

based in Tempe, Arizona, and distinguished visiting scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Dr. Bell, welcome back to Science Friday.

Thanks for having me on, Florida.

Okay, Jim, so what do you make of this announcement of these two possible plans with no commitment to either?

Is this a good sign for the future of the mission? A bad sign? Neutral. What's your take?

Well, the good news is that NASA is supportive of doing this mission, continuing to try to find ways to bring these spectacular samples that the Perseverance Rover is collecting back to the Earth.

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