This NASA mission will give scientists a whiff of air captured on Mars

Since landing on Mars in 2021, NASA’s Perseverance Rover has been circling the red planet doing what dad does at Costco: quietly collecting samples. And just like Dad does with those jumbo shrimp tasters, Perseverance is now preparing to take those samples home.

It’s part of the Mars Sample Return Program, a long-running mission between NASA and the European Space Agency that will bring back to Earth the first-ever samples of rock and dust collected from the Martian surface, as well as (hopefully) a vial of the Martian atmosphere . The goal is to return the samples by 2033, with many intermediate steps along the way.

The complex mission will send a new lander that will land on Mars carrying two Ingenuity style helicopters and a prototype return rocket. The plan is for the Perseverance rover to carry its samples to the lander, with helicopters acting as backup.

Once the specimens arrive on the lander, they will be processed by a series of robots and transferred aboard the 3-meter Mars Ascent Vehicle. They will then blast into Mars orbit to rendezvous with ESA’s Earth Return Orbiter for the journey home.

This is a complex mission with many moving parts. In our latest video in the CNET Explains series, we look at what it takes to return pieces of another planet back to Earth.

We break down the mission step by step, looking at all the autonomous robots that must work together flawlessly on a planet up to 400 million miles away. And we discover why a few precious vials of Martian material could unlock the secrets of our nearest planetary neighbor and give us physical evidence of ancient life elsewhere in our solar system.

For a deep dive into the Mars Sample Return mission, check out the video above.