journey into space return from mars

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audiobook (Unabridged) ∣ Journey Into Space

By charles chiltern.

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9780563524991

Journey Into Space

Charles Chiltern

AudioGO Ltd

05 February 1996

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JOURNEY INTO SPACE

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Journey Into Space: The Return From Mars

Author Charles Chilton

Narrator Various

Duration 1h 27m

Categories Adult Fiction , Science Fiction and Fantasy

Key Stage KS4

Publisher BBC Audiobooks

Version Unabridged

Charles Chilton's classic science fiction series, Journey Into Space, stormed the BBC airwaves during the 1950s. Between 1953 and 1958, a devoted audience of six million adults and children attentively followed Jet Morgan and his crew from one cliff-hanger to another as, together, they faced the unknown perils of space. Return From Mars is the final adventure in the classic science fiction series. The ninety-minute episode is paired with a special half-hour feature, Journey Into Space Again, which is written and presented by Charles Chilton. It includes extracts from the series and interviews with its leading actors, Andrew Faulds (Jet Morgan) and David Jacobs.

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Charles Chilton's classic science fiction trilogy stormed the BBC airwaves during the 1950s. Its gripping story lines, extra-terrestrial sound effects and atmospheric music engaged the listener as never before. Between 1953 and 1958, a devoted audience of adults and children attentively followed Captain Jet Morgan and his crew from one cliff-hanger...

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Journey Into Space: The Return from Mars

Description.

• Charles Chiltern - Author
• ©BBC Audiobooks 2006 - Copyright holder

OverDrive Listen audiobook

• ISBN: 9781405669924
• File size: 42095 KB
• Release date: October 31, 2006
• Duration: 01:27:41

MP3 audiobook

• File size: 42171 KB
• Duration: 01:27:40
• Number of parts: 2

OverDrive Listen audiobook MP3 audiobook

Fiction Science Fiction & Fantasy

Publisher: AudioGO Ltd Edition: Unabridged

OverDrive Listen audiobook ISBN: 9781405669924 File size: 42095 KB Release date: October 31, 2006 Duration: 01:27:41

MP3 audiobook ISBN: 9781405669924 File size: 42171 KB Release date: October 31, 2006 Duration: 01:27:40 Number of parts: 2

• Formats OverDrive Listen audiobook MP3 audiobook
• Languages English

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Journey Into Space: The World in Peril Audio CD – Unabridged, August 4, 2011

• Print length 1 pages
• Language English
• Publisher BBC Books
• Publication date August 4, 2011
• Dimensions 5.5 x 23 x 5.5 inches
• ISBN-10 1408469944
• ISBN-13 978-1408469941
• See all details

Editorial Reviews

About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ BBC Books; Unabridged edition (August 4, 2011)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Audio CD ‏ : ‎ 1 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1408469944
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1408469941
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 23 x 5.5 inches

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Returning to Earth —

Nasa says it needs better ideas on how to return samples from mars, the jet propulsion laboratory is losing its grip on managing nasa's next flagship mission..

Stephen Clark - Apr 16, 2024 1:53 pm UTC

NASA's $11 billion plan to robotically bring rock samples from Mars back to Earth is too expensive and will take too long, the agency's administrator said Monday, so officials are tasking government and private sector engineers to come up with a better plan.

The agency's decision on how to move forward with the Mars Sample Return (MSR) program follows an independent review last year that found ballooning costs and delays threatened the mission's viability. The effort would likely cost NASA between $8 billion and $11 billion, and the launch would be delayed at least two years until 2030, with samples getting back to Earth a few years later, the review board concluded .

But that's not the whole story. Like all federal agencies, NASA faces new spending restrictions imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act, a bipartisan budget deal struck last year between the White House and congressional Republicans. With these new budget headwinds, NASA officials determined the agency's plan for Mars Sample Return would not get specimens from the red planet back to Earth until 2040.

One of the primary goals of NASA's Perseverance rover, driving around Mars since 2021, is to collect and catalog more than 30 samples of Martian rocket, sediment, and air for return to Earth by a future mission. Perseverance is sealing these specimens in cigar-size titanium tubes, and collectively, they will total roughly half a kilogram in mass.

Returning pristine specimens from Mars to Earth for analysis in ground-based labs has been a top priority for the planetary science community's decadal survey process. But getting those samples back has turned out to be a lot more challenging than NASA thought.

"The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive, and not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson told reporters Monday.

Getting in gear

So NASA is shaking up the Mars Sample Return program. The preexisting plan came together over the last seven years, with refinements from engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the institution charged with managing the effort.

The most recent iteration of the Mars Sample Return mission involves two launches. One would take place in 2030 with a European spacecraft that will orbit Mars and wait for the second mission—the responsibility of NASA—to depart Earth in 2035 with a Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL). The second launch would involve a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV), the rocket necessary to launch samples off the red planet and into space.

The lander would deliver the MAV to the Martian surface, and the Perseverance rover, already on Mars, will deliver sealed tubes of rock and soil specimens into a container for the trip back to Earth. The MAV would then launch the material into orbit around Mars, where the European-built Earth Return Orbiter would rendezvous with the sample container and pick it up for the journey home.

These launches were previously scheduled to occur two years apart in the late 2020s, but those target dates are no longer attainable with the current plan and budget, officials said Monday. Stretching out the two launches over a five-year span will spread out expenditures on the MSR program to fit within the agency's projected budget without "cannibalizing" NASA's other planetary science projects, like the Dragonfly mission to explore Saturn's moon Titan .

The most recent plan unveiled Monday would also remove two helicopters from the Sample Retrieval Lander. These helicopters, which could have picked up sample tubes and delivered them to the pod that would return them to Earth, were supposed to be based on NASA's Ingenuity helicopter successfully demonstrated on Mars with the Perseverance rover. Instead, the updated plan would rely entirely on Perseverance to hand off sample tubes to the Mars Ascent Vehicle.

There are also a few other changes to NASA's MSR architecture, including replacing solar arrays on the Sample Retrieval Lander with a nuclear power generator. This would improve the lander's reliability and provide better thermal conditions for the MAV, according to Sandra Connelly, deputy head of NASA's science mission directorate.

However, this architecture is pretty much dead on arrival.

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Channel ars technica.

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NASA is reimagining the future of Mars exploration, driving new scientific discoveries, and preparing for humans on Mars. NASA’s Mars Exploration Program will focus the next two decades on its science-driven systemic approach on these strategic goals: exploring for potential life, understanding the geology and climate of Mars, and preparation for human exploration.

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Nasa sets path to return mars samples, seeks innovative designs.

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Nasa headquarters.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson shared on Monday the agency’s path forward on the Mars Sample Return program, including seeking innovative designs to return valuable samples from Mars to Earth. Such samples will not only help us understand the formation and evolution of our solar system but can be used to prepare for future human explorers and to aid in NASA’s search for signs of ancient life.

Over the last quarter century, NASA has engaged in a systematic effort to determine the early history of Mars and how it can help us understand the formation and evolution of habitable worlds, including Earth. As part of that effort, Mars Sample Return has been a long-term goal of international planetary exploration for the past two decades. NASA’s Perseverance rover has been collecting samples for later collection and return to Earth since it landed on Mars in 2021.

“Mars Sample Return will be one of the most complex missions NASA has ever undertaken. The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, and a 2040 return date is too far away,” said Nelson. “Safely landing and collecting the samples, launching a rocket with the samples off another planet – which has never been done before – and safely transporting the samples more than 33 million miles back to Earth is no small task. We need to look outside the box to find a way ahead that is both affordable and returns samples in a reasonable timeframe.”  

The agency also has released NASA’s response to a Mars Sample Return Independent Review Board report from September 2023. This includes: an updated mission design with reduced complexity; improved resiliency; risk posture; stronger accountability and coordination; and an overall budget likely in the $8 billion to $11 billion range. Given the Fiscal Year 2025 budget and anticipated budget constraints, as well as the need to maintain a balanced science portfolio, the current mission design will return samples in 2040.

To achieve the ambitious goal of returning the key samples to Earth earlier and at a lower cost, the agency is asking the NASA community to work together to develop a revised plan that leverages innovation and proven technology. Additionally, NASA soon will solicit architecture proposals from industry that could return samples in the 2030s, and lowers cost, risk, and mission complexity.

“NASA does visionary science – and returning diverse, scientifically-relevant samples from Mars is a key priority,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “To organize a mission at this level of complexity, we employ decades of lessons on how to run a large mission, including incorporating the input we get from conducting independent reviews. Our next steps will position us to bring this transformational mission forward and deliver revolutionary science from Mars – providing critical new insights into the origins and evolution of Mars, our solar system, and life on Earth.”

For more information about NASA’s research at Mars, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/mars

Dewayne Washington / Karen Fox Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1600 [email protected] / [email protected]

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• Mars Sample Return (MSR)

Journey into Space

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NASA Seeks ‘Hail Mary’ for Its Mars Rocks Return Mission

The agency will seek new ideas for its Mars Sample Return program, expected to be billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.

By Kenneth Chang

Kenneth Chang has reported on almost every NASA mission to Mars during the 21st century.

The cost of a proposed NASA mission to gather rocks on Mars and return them to Earth is spiraling upward and slipping further into the future. So on Monday, space agency officials asked for ideas on simplifying the mission and trimming its price tag.

“The bottom line is that $11 billion is too expensive,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference on Monday. “And not returning samples until 2040 is unacceptably too long.”

The mission, known as Mars Sample Return, is central to the search for signs that life may have existed on the red planet. The idea is to bring samples of rock and soil back to Earth so that scientists can prod and poke at them using their most sophisticated tools.

NASA had hoped that Mars Sample Return would cost $5 billion to $7 billion, and that the rocks would arrive on Earth in 2033.

But last fall, a panel that reviewed the mission concluded that the cost was likely to be much higher, from $8 to $11 billion. NASA officials said on Monday that after they looked over the review, they agreed with that cost estimate, and that, given budget constraints, the current Mars Sample Return mission would not be able to deliver the rocks before 2040.

On Tuesday, NASA plans to issue a “request for information” seeking alternative plans from aerospace companies as well as experts within NASA, with proposals to be due on May 17. Of those, NASA would finance several of the proposals, with studies finishing later this year. Then NASA would have to decide its next step.

“We’re going to need to go off to some very innovative new possibilities for design and certainly leave no stone unturned,” said Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate.

At the same time, she said she hoped for “traditional, tried-and-true architectures” that would reduce the risk of delay and failure.

“This is the Hail Mary,” Casey Dreier, the chief of space policy at the Planetary Society, a nonprofit organization that supports space exploration, said in an interview. Mr. Dreier said he had thought that NASA would simply announce a delay, which would reduce the amount it was spending on the mission in a given year, while adding to the final price tag.

“That would have been an easier way, from our perspective, to preserve the plan as it existed, to add certainty where there’s uncertainty,” Mr. Dreier said.

The first phase of Mars Sample Return is already underway. NASA’s Perseverance rover , which landed on Mars in 2021, has been drilling and collecting cylindrical samples of rock and soil in the Jezero Crater , which contains an ancient river delta.

The current Mars Sample Return plan, devised by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, involves a complex choreography . First, a new robotic spacecraft would land near the Perseverance rover, which would then hand over about 30 of its rock samples. Those would then be launched into orbit around Mars. Yet another spacecraft, from the European Space Agency, would retrieve those samples, take them back to Earth and drop them off within a small disk-shaped vehicle that would land in a Utah desert.

To undertake a mission that would move more quickly and at a lower cost, one idea might be to leave some of the samples behind on Mars. That would reduce the size and complexity of the spacecraft needed.

If scientists were forced to choose which rocks they want most, “I think that will be some very, very lively and very exciting scientific chatter,” Dr. Fox said.

In February, Mr. Dreier wrote an essay about whether NASA could turn to Elon Musk’s SpaceX for a cheaper robotic Mars Sample Return mission. SpaceX’s mammoth Starship rocket is being designed with the goal of sending people to Mars .

“The answer is almost certainly ‘no,’” Mr. Dreier wrote then. “At least, not anytime soon.”

But if Mr. Musk and SpaceX are interested, NASA is now willing to listen. Mr. Dreier said that SpaceX would need to solve numerous technical challenges, including how it could produce propellants for the return trip.

“Is this getting to be less, or more expensive and time-consuming and risky than the original J.P.L. concept?” Mr. Dreier said, referring to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s plan.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Dreier said that, as an optimist, perhaps Mr. Nelson was right and that someone would offer a better solution.

But he added that NASA’s announcement on Monday could be a pretext for canceling the mission, or trying to convince Congress that it indeed needed $11 billion.

“It may just be that people don’t want to accept that that’s what it costs,” he said. “I guess that’s one of the things we’ll find out.”

Kenneth Chang , a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth. More about Kenneth Chang

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