January 8, 20255 min readNASA sees two paths for saving its beleaguered plan to retrieve materials from the Red Planet but won’t choose between them until 2026By Lee Billings edited by Dean VisserNASA’s Perseverance Mars rover appears in this selfie it snapped in January 2023 alongside several sample tubes scattered about the landscape of Jezero Crater. The space agency is developing a new plan to retrieve most of Perseverance’s samples for study on Earth in the 2030s. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSSNASA’s troubled Mars Sample Return program is stuck at a crossroads—and is likely…
