According to the website of the U.S. science magazine Science, on June 6, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee recently released the text of a 2026 fiscal year funding bill involving multiple fields, which includes provisions supporting the White House's proposal to terminate NASA's "Mars Sample Return" mission.

NASA originally planned to use this mission to return dozens of Martian core samples collected by the "Perseverance" Mars rover to Earth. The Science article stated that although the bill still needs to be passed by both chambers of Congress and signed by President Trump to take effect, the bill text negotiated by both the Democratic and Republican parties effectively means that the "Mars Sample Return" mission will be terminated.

According to the report, the bill text proposes transferring $1.1 billion in funds to a project called "Mars Future Missions," aimed at continuing the technological development work related to the "Mars Sample Return" mission. The bill text also shows that the science budget set for NASA in the 2026 fiscal year is $7.25 billion, a 1% decrease from the previous year, but a significant increase compared to the White House's initial proposal to cut the agency's science budget by half.

For a long time, American planetary scientists have had significant differences of opinion regarding the future of the "Mars Sample Return" mission, with some concerned that its high budget would consume too much research funding. A September 2023 independent review committee assessment report indicated that the project's total budget could reach as high as $11 billion. Afterward, NASA's January 2025 mission proposal reduced the project's budget to $7 billion, but given the financial difficulties facing many U.S. space exploration projects, this amount is still considered excessively high.

The Science report said that terminating the "Mars Sample Return" mission would leave the most important research goals of U.S. planetary scientists in an uncertain state. Philip Christensen, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University, said that the "Mars Sample Return" mission would provide the scientific and engineering basis for sending humans to Mars, and abandoning this effort would mean that the United States would lose its leadership in Mars exploration.

Victoria Hamilton, chair of NASA's Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group, said that how NASA uses the remaining available time of the "Perseverance" rover has become an urgent practical issue. The rover has been on Mars for nearly five years, and its sample tubes are almost full. She hopes that NASA will collaborate with the scientific community in the future to develop a plan to retrieve these samples.

Source: Xinhua News Agency

Original: toutiao.com/article/7592574223118320143/

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