NASA Budget Cuts Could Have A Martian Silver Lining

Forbes

10-07-2025

With its active volcanism, Iceland is often used as a stand in for the surface of Mars. Bruce Dorminey
Iceland is an astrobiologist's dream — rife with active volcanic landscapes, basaltic plains and lava tunnels that has repeatedly been used by NASA as a stand in for Mars. But at last week's European Astrobiology Institute's BEACON 25 conference in Reykjavik, most attendees were clamoring to get their hands on samples of the real thing.
NASA's Perseverance rover — now perched on the rim of Jezero Crater in Mars' southern highlands, has collected some 41 subsurface samples just waiting for a sample return mission to retrieve them back to Earth. But that doesn't seem likely to happen anytime soon.
Yet at least one planetary scientist refuses to be hamstrung by focusing on the funding hole in the Martian sample return donut. That's because even if there's a decades-long delay in getting the samples back to Earth, Perseverance's Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator has plenty of life left and can potentially use the time to explore beyond Jezero Crater's rim.
Perseverance has dropped samples on the crater floor, but it has more samples now from the rim in its storage cache, Adomas Valantinas, a Brown University planetary scientist, tells me in Reykjavik. But it would have to return back to the crater floor, where the lander from the Mars sample return mission would touch down, because it's flat and is a good area for landing with no strong winds, he says.
Thus, in what could be a bit of serendipity, if the sample return is postponed indefinitely, Perseverance is free to roam beyond the rim of Jezero Crater.
Why beyond the rim?
Beyond the crater rim, there is this area called Nili Planum, a flat terrain that contains a lot of volcanic minerals, says Valantinas. If you go 30 to 50 km south, also beyond the rim in the northeast Syrtis region there are a lot of minerals that could have been formed by hydrothermal activity, he says. So, going south beyond the rim, you also have rocks that are potentially 4.1-billion-years-old where the potential for a habitable environment was even greater, says Valantinas.
As noted in his Reykjavik presentation, Valantinas and colleagues' findings have specifically been researching the 3.8-billion-year-old, 45-km-wide Jezero impact crater. The Jezero impactor hit about the same time that life first formed on Earth and when liquid water was stable on the Martian surface.
We used observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to understand the composition of the Jezero Crater rim, and we also did numerical simulations to understand how materials moved post impact and where they were deposited, says Valantinas. Ancient Rocks
Our study basically shows that the materials in the Jezero rim are diverse, and they may represent a habitable environment 3.8 billion years ago, because they not only contain primary minerals, but secondary alteration minerals when liquid water was present, says Valantinas.
Why is geological diversity important?
Diversity probably means more complex mineralogy and more complex chemistry, which could mean a more habitable environment, says Valantinas. If we were seeing the same three or four different minerals and no diversity in the composition, that would probably mean it wasn't a habitable environment, he says.
What kind of atmosphere did Mars have when the Jezero impactor hit?
The atmosphere was probably thick enough for liquid water to exist on the surface, says Valantinas. So, it probably had some nitrogen, carbon dioxide and probably some water vapor, he says.
Perseverance has already found some of the oldest rocks ever sampled on the Martian surface. But we need to push the envelope of what we really understand about the history of the red planet, which has both frustrated and perplexed even its most ardent advocates. That's why retrieving these samples for analysis in the best labs the world has to offer is so crucial to humanity's understanding of solar system science.
Icelandic landscape near the boundary between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. Bruce Dorminey Radiation Threat
There's also the potential that a decades-long delay in retrieving the samples that the Perseverance rover has collected could be affected by incoming cosmic radiation. Most of the samples are now safely positioned inside the rover but there are others that have been left on the surface near the landing site of a future sample return mission.
The idea being that if for whatever reason, the rover malfunctions and can't make it back to the Jezero Crater basin, there would still be a few samples prepositioned on the surface which a return lander could retrieve for the journey back to Earth.
Perseverance collected the samples themselves using a coring mechanism to a depth of only about 7 cm in depth. But now these sample cores are above ground they are much more susceptible to the effects of surface radiation.
Even at 7 cm of subsurface depth, you must think about corpuscular (subatomic particle) radiation and galactic radiation, which is also bombarding the surface, Jean-Pierre De Vera, a planetary scientist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), tells me in Reykjavik. And after several years inside the rover on the surface, the samples' original subsurface organics could certainly be changed, says De Vera.
I'll be in the Icelandic Highlands for a week sampling iron oxide minerals in every kind of environment, from cold springs to hot springs and rivers, says Valantinas. The idea is to use Iceland as an analog for processes that could have happened on ancient Mars, he says.
Why is Iceland better than anywhere else?
Iceland is a volcanic island with basalt as a kind of the bedrock material, says Valantinas. So, the weathering of the basalts leads to secondary minerals in Iceland, and similar secondary minerals are observed on Mars, he says.
Meanwhile, astrobiologists worldwide are hoping that the Mars samples can find their way back to Earth in a timely manner.
As for why the Mars is so important to astrobiology?
We're busy looking for life on exoplanets and we have Mars here that's within reach, Benton Clark, senior research geochemist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. tells me in Reykjavik. All we need to do is to bring those samples back and we're going to learn so much more; maybe detect evidence of life, says Clark. Forbes Why Europe May Beat NASA To Life On Mars By Bruce Dorminey Forbes How NASA Can Avoid A False Positive Mars Microfossil Detection By Bruce Dorminey