NASA is seemingly caught between a Mars rock and a hard place.
The space agency’s best-laid plan to robotically retrieve prized samples of the Red Planet for scrutiny back on Earth has been decades in the making and is seen as a "must-do" by many planetary scientists. Now it has gone awry, imperiled by a wildly unrealistic budget and schedule. Although a programmatic overhaul is now underway, no one can yet say just how — or when — the Mars Sample Return (MSR) initiative will succeed, and lawmakers have threatened the project with outright cancellation.
