Mars sample return

A Mars sample return mission (MSR) would be a spaceflight mission to collect rock and dust samples from Mars and to return them to Earth. Sample return would be a very powerful type of exploration, because analysis is freed from the time, budget, and space constraints of spacecraft sensors. Any of Earth's laboratories could study a sample.

According to Louis Friedman, Executive Director of The Planetary Society, a Mars sample return mission is often described by the planetary science community as one of the most important robotic space missions, due to its high expected scientific return on investment.

Over time, several missions were planned but none of the proposed missions got beyond the planning phase. The three latest proposals for a MSR mission are a NASA-ESA proposal, a Russian proposal (Mars-Grunt), and a Chinese proposal.

MSR was the highest priority Flagship Mission proposed for NASA by the Planetary Decadal Survey 2013–2022: The Future of Planetary Science.

The return of Mars samples would be beneficial to science by allowing more extensive analysis to be undertaken of the samples than could be done by instruments painstakingly transferred to Mars. Also, the presence of the samples on Earth would allow scientific equipment to be used on stored samples, even years and decades after the sample return mission.

In 2006, MEPAG identified 55 important future science investigations related to the exploration of Mars. In 2008, they concluded that about half of the investigations "could be addressed to one degree or another by MSR", making MSR "the single mission that would make the most progress towards the entire list" of investigations. Moreover, it was found that a significant fraction of the investigations cannot be meaningfully advanced without returned samples.

One source of Mars samples is what are believed to be Martian meteorites, which are rocks from Mars that made their way to Earth. Of over 61,000 meteorites that have been found on Earth, 132 were identified as Martian as of 3 March 2014^[update]. These meteorites are thought to be from Mars because they have elemental and isotopic compositions that are similar to rocks and atmosphere gases analyzed by spacecraft on Mars.

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