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Bringing Mars rocks to Earth: Our greatest interplanetary circus act

With fresh Mars rocks on Earth, more scientists will be able to examine them, employing a wide array of the most sophisticated equipment in laboratories around the world

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One of the key tasks for Perseverance is to drill up to 39 rock cores, each a half-inch wide and 2.4 inches long, that look interesting enough to merit additional scrutiny on Earth. (Photo-NASA)

Kenneth Chang | NYT

7 min read Last Updated : Jul 29 2020 | 11:26 AM IST

Send a robotic spacecraft to Mars, grab some rocks and dirt and bring those back to Earth.

How hard could that be?

It’s more like an interplanetary circus act than you might imagine, but NASA and the European Space Agency think that now is the time they can finally pull off this complex choreography, tossing the rocks from one spacecraft to another before the samples finally land on Earth in 2031.

“The science community, of course, has lusted after doing this for quite some time,” said James Watzin, the director of the Mars exploration program at NASA.

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