The Perseverance rover has been collecting soil samples from the surface of Mars for five years.
Scientists are still hoping a new mission will someday bring the samples back to Earth. Aileen Yingst with the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute says the technology needed for a sample return journey is complicated.
"Do you send something that will land close to where the samples are and send out a rover to drive and somehow pick them up? It is a complex set of problems," she explained.
Perseverance has drilled 33 core samples into the Martian surface at Jezero crater and left them on the ground. Each one is catalogued and photographed and can be viewed online. Yingst said drilling for the samples couldn't wait.
"You have a rover that has a limited amount of sample tubes, a limited amount of resources and it has a limited amount of time it has power on the surface."
Congress killed a proposal for a planned NASA mission last month, leaving engineers fine-tuning the technology for a sample return trip to Mars. Some experts think it now might be up to a private company to take up the task decades from now.
