Outcomes of the Science Community Workshop on the Mars 2020 Mission First Sample Depot for the Mars Sample Return Campaign

Abstract

As the Perseverance rover collects samples in Jezero crater, NASA and ESA are advancing their planning for the safe and secure return of samples to Earth to conduct future scientific investigations. The strategy to maximize the probability of Mars Sample Return (MSR) success is to divide the samples into two caches, with “success” defined as the delivery of one of those caches of samples to Earth. This strategy can be implemented by Perseverance placing a First Depot (a depot is a cache placed on the ground) in Jezero Crater, including one member of each of the paired samples Perseverance has collected so far. The second of each of the paired samples would be retained on board as the Rover Cache, and this group of samples would be augmented by the collection of additional samples. However, this strategy requires each cache to be independently scientifically return-worthy (SRW), meaning each has enough scientific value to justify the time, money, and effort for the MSR Campaign to retrieve those samples. Mars 2020 Project Science and the MSR Campaign Science Group (MCSG) concur that Perseverance has assembled a sample collection that is SRW. A workshop was thus organized in September 2022 with the goal of soliciting input from the community on the definition of SRW and on whether they agree that the proposed set of samples for the First Depot meets this definition.