Rocket Lab wants to bring NASA’s Perseverance rover samples containing potential biosignatures back from Mars | As interest in Mars Sample Return resurfaces, Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck says his company already has experience with the spacecraft and hardware needed to get the job done

>The current framework calls for a NASA rover to retrieve Perseverance’s dropped samples

The samples are stored in Perseverance, and the plan has long been to have Perseverance deliver them to the sample retrieval lander and Mars ascent vehicle. That would remain the same whoever/whatever lands on Mars and returns the samples. The plan for an ESA fetch rover was firmly abandoned in 2022.

Originally, the plan was to take two samples form each selected target for redundancy. One would be stored on the rover, and the other would be dropped with other samples at at a small number of cache locations on the surface for a future fetch rover to retrieve. However, the surface caching was only done with a small number of samples and one cache site. For years, only one sample has been taken, and stored on Perseverance.