Mars Rover Sample Return (1988)

In August 1986, in the aftermath of the January 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle accident, NASA Administrator James Fletcher appointed astronaut Sally Ride to serve as his Special Assistant for Strategic Planning and asked her to prepare a blueprint for NASA's future. The first American woman in space, Ride had served on the Rogers Commission, the committee appointed by President Ronald Reagan to investigate the Challenger accident. Her new task was a response to NASA critics, who had declared that the civilian space agency lacked a long-term direction.

In preparing her August 1987 report Leadership and America's Future in Space, Ride enlisted the aid of some 80 experts from across NASA and beyond. In her introduction, she acknowledged that the U.S. could not lead the world in every area of spaceflight. She then proposed several alternate "leadership initiatives," each designed to establish U.S. preeminence in a specific arena of space activity.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC), respectively the leading NASA facilities for robotic and piloted spaceflight, had jointly studied Mars Sample Return (MSR) using rovers since late 1983. The Mars Study Team (MST), a group appointed by NASA's Mars Exploration Strategy Advisory Group to consider an international Mars Rover Sample Return (MRSR) mission, completed its report in January 1987, while the Ride report was in preparation. These studies led Ride to make a trio of MRSR missions by 2001 the central component of her robotic planetary exploration leadership initiative. A robotic mission to bring Mars samples to Earth had never before received such prominence in a high-level NASA publication.

A month after the Ride Report hit the street, JPL created the MRSR Development Flight Project Office, the first task of which was to lead an MRSR "Pre-Phase A Study" based on the earlier JPL/JSC and MST studies. Initial Pre-Phase A work had commenced at JPL in April 1987 and at JSC in May 1987. In September 1988, Pre-Phase A Study participants presented their results to the MRSR Project Review Board at JPL. Two weeks later, they submitted their Review Board presentations to NASA Headquarters in the form of a nine- section report.

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