What is the likelihood of a return sample mission from Mars in the near future… and if so, where would the targeted landing site be???
Max Answer: It depends on what you mean by near future. It may be possible that we could see a sample return mission on the surface of Mars in the 10-15 year timeframe. Choosing a landing site is a very difficult job. The two landing sites that our rovers are landing at were culled down from hundreds over a period of a few years. Certainly, by the time we send a sample return mission to the surface, we’ll have a lot more data from other orbiter missions, so we’ll have to take all of that into account. We could actually get samples of dust back from Mars within 5-7 years, though. NASA has a program called the Mars Scout missions. There are four possible scout missions for the folks at NASA to choose from right now, and one of them involves flying a bullet-shaped spacecraft through the atmosphere of Mars to collect dust and bring it back to Earth. Knowing what the martian dust is made of is very important because it covers so much of the planet and it is all the same. There should be a d
