When it landed on Mars in 2021, the Perseverance rover set out to collect roughly 30 samples of soil from the red planet. The grand space strategy at the time would see the samples retrieved by another spacecraft and brought back to earth later.

Originally meant to be an autonomous retrieval, led by local aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, President Donald Trump appears poised to cancel it, according to the latest skinny budget released earlier this month. In it, NASA’s science budget is set to be cut by more than $3 billion, with the document specifically highlighting the “grossly over budget” Mars Sample Return mission.

Overall, the skinny budget cuts NASA science spending by 47%. The overall budget for the space agency was slimmed down by 23%, though key lawmakers in Congress are already pushing back on those cuts, according to Politico.

The budget document said later crewed missions will be responsible for retrieval.

An independent review board estimated the mission could cost between $8 billion and $11 billion. Lockheed is convinced it can do it for $3 billion, according to Lockheed Martin’s Director of Exploration Whitley Poyser. 

“What we felt enabled that (retrieval price tag) was the ability to leverage proven, demonstrated technologies, reduce overall risk by reducing mission complexity and leveraging things like smaller landers,” she said Monday morning during a media briefing of the 41st Space Symposium at The Broadmoor. “We still very much stand behind it. Our solution proposed returning all 30 samples.” 

Poyser also pointed to the OSIRIS-REX mission. This mission was also a sample return, but instead of another planet, it collected material from an asteroid and returned it to Earth. They were recovered in 2023 intact.  This success gave Lockheed Martin engineers a lot of confidence in the mission and approach, Poyser said. 

The scientific community also still wants to see the mission accomplished. Last year, NASA said a Mars sample return will “revolutionize our understanding of Mars, our solar system.”

But most importantly, it will prepare the agency for human exploration of the red planet, long a dream of many in the space industry. 

A 2024 post from the Planetary Society, a non-profit space science group co-founded by Carl Sagan, outlined several reasons why returning the samples to Earth is beneficial. One of the main reasons is equipment used to study the samples is a lot better on Earth than it is on Mars. Lockheed’s Poyser reiterated this point, adding some studies cannot be done on site on Mars. 

“I am absolutely sure there are still many things that we can learn about Mars,” Poyser added.