First Mars Sample Return study (1967)

On October 3, 1966, the NASA Office of Manned Space Flight (OMSF) Planetary Joint Action Group (JAG) released the report of its study of piloted Mars flyby missions, the first of which was scheduled to leave Earth in 1975. The study's most novel feature was its proposal that the piloted flyby craft release automated Mars Surface Sample Return (MSSR) probes just before it passed Mars. One or more of these would land, collect samples of martian dirt, rock, and air, and launch them back to the flyby craft for preliminary analysis and return to laboratories on Earth.

Three weeks after the OMSF report began to circulate (October 26, 1966), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the California Institute of Technology-run lab which developed and managed NASA robotic lunar and planetary missions, responded to it by launching a study of "some of the problems involved in using unmanned spacecraft systems for returning Martian surface samples to Earth." The study, performed at the request of NASA's Office of Space Science Applications with computational support from Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute, was the first to outline scenarios for an entirely automated Mars sample return mission.

JPL released a preliminary report on November 1, 1966, then followed it with a detailed final report in March 1967. The latter attempted to answer the following question: With a single Saturn V launch vehicle, is it feasible to launch from Earth an unmanned spacecraft system capable of procuring from the Martian surface a one-pound soil sample and returning that sample to the Earth's surface?

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