Mars 2020 experienced cost overruns that Lori Glaze, acting director of NASA’s planetary science division, said fell below a 15 percent threshold that would require a formal replan.
NASA estimated Mars 2020’s cost at $2,100,000,000 plus $300,000,000 for its first Martian year of operations at Key Decision Point C in 2016.
NASA considered small decreases in other operating Mars missions and cost savings from the end of the Opportunity mission as potential sources of funding to address Mars 2020 cost growth.
NASA planned to seek economies within the Mars 2020 project and look to the Mars program to cover some cost growth in order to minimize impacts to the overall planetary portfolio.
NASA indicated it was unlikely to remove an instrument from Mars 2020 because most hardware was already built, integrated, and being tested and removing an instrument would offer limited savings at a late development stage.
NASA indicated that Mars 2020’s cost growth was less than 15 percent over the agreed-upon cost for the mission.
The fiscal year 2020 budget includes funding for a Mars sample return mission that would collect the sample cached by the Mars 2020 rover and return it to Earth, with a planned launch as soon as 2026.
The lean sample return concept proposes one mission that would land near the Mars 2020 site, use a rover to collect samples, and load them into a small rocket that would launch them into Martian orbit.
NASA unveiled a 2017 concept called 'lean sample return' intended to simplify and lower the cost of missions to retrieve and return samples collected by Mars 2020.
NASA’s fiscal year 2019 budget requested $50,000,000 to support work on future missions after the Mars 2020 rover with an emphasis on planning for missions that will collect and return samples cached by Mars 2020.
NASA has not committed to a MarCO-like relay mission for the Mars 2020 rover, but MarCO’s success opened the possibility of using smallsats on future deep space missions.
More than 60 potential Mars 2020 landing sites were considered at the first landing site workshop in 2014.
Mars 2020 has an estimated total cost of a little less than $2,500,000,000.
Mars 2020 is based on the Curiosity rover design and will use the same skycrane landing system.
Mars 2020 is scheduled to launch in July 2020 on an Atlas V rocket and to land in Jezero Crater in February 2021.
Jezero Crater was chosen as the Mars 2020 landing site in part because of the prospects of finding biosignatures of past life there.
The Mars Sample Fetch Rover would use a robotic arm to gather samples cached by NASA’s Mars 2020 rover mission.
Mars 2020 is the first mission required to deal with samples returned from Mars and thus moves NASA into a new planetary protection regime.
The committee concluded that missions like Mars 2020 and Europa Clipper require a reconsideration of how NASA handles planetary protection policy development.
The Mars Helicopter will be included on the Mars 2020 rover mission to perform a series of test flights over the course of a month.