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Right now, one of the most advanced planetary explorers ever built is scouring the surface of Mars. Supported by a team of hundreds of scientists back on Earth, the Perseverance rover has traveled nearly the distance of a marathon to answer some of the biggest questions about our neighboring world: What was the planet like eons ago? Was it ever habitable? Did it host life?

One rock visited by Perseverance, called Cheyava Falls, is speckled with iron-rich minerals that might be able to answer these questions, scientists announced in September. On Earth, the presence of these minerals usually means microbes that used iron in the chemical reactions essential to their metabolism once lived there. Does the same hold true on Mars? A piece of Cheyava Falls is safely tucked inside the rover’s storage cache. If it can be shipped to Earth, analysis with the full range of laboratory equipment here could tell us the answer.

But Cheyava Falls’s ride to our planet might have fallen through. The Perseverance rover is the first phase of a multistep mission to bring bits of Mars to Earth, known as Mars Sample Return (MSR), and the next step is dangling by a thread. The Trump administration has proposed canceling the return portion of the endeavor. The mission’s fate, as of press time, rests with the U.S. Congress.

The situation has dismayed scientists who have longed to get their hands on Martian rocks. “We’ve been working for so many decades to try to make this happen,” says Vicky Hamilton, a planetary geologist at the Southwest Research Institute’s Colorado branch. Now that Perseverance has scooped up prized samples, scientists are faced with the prospect of leaving them on Mars to languish. “It’s hard to watch.”

Even if the mission isn’t canceled, how to finish it remains an open question. In 2024 NASA said it was scrapping its initial, troubled plan for MSR—deemed too costly and too far behind schedule—to seek cheaper commercial approaches. The agency now has multiple options on the table but has yet to decide which course to take, if any.

At stake are potentially profound insights about Mars. We know that some three billion to four billion years ago, Mars was warm and wet, with lakes and seas on its surface. What we don’t know is whether life ever took hold there. Can we find out?

Perseverance touched down on Mars in February 2021 following a nail-biter of a landing. After the spacecraft had torn through the Martian atmosphere and descended toward the surface by parachute, a crablike, rocket-propelled platform called Sky Crane lowered the rover on cables to the surface. It landed inside Jezero Crater, a 28-mile-wide (45-kilometer) dent in the Martian landscape. A river once flowed there, and the bone-dry delta it left behind is visible from space.

If anything ever lived on Mars, Jezero is as good a place as any to look for signs of it. It’s nearly impossible, however, to send a mission to Mars that would be capable of finding life without help from labs on Earth. That’s why scientists have been lobbying since the 1960s for a way to bring pieces of Mars here.

MSR is the culmination of those efforts. In 2000, Scott Hubbard, NASA’s first Mars program director—sometimes called the “Mars Czar”—was tasked with turning around the fortunes of an ailing program that had experienced multiple failures in the 1990s, including the loss of two orbiters and a lander. “I took the existing program down to the roots, almost a bare sheet of paper,” Hubbard says. The top priority, he says, was to find out: “Did life ever exist on Mars, and could it be there today?”

Interest in Martian life had been spurred by a now infamous announcement from the White House lawn in 1996, when President Bill Clinton declared that signs of life had been detected in a Martian meteorite found in Antarctica. That claim was later refuted—but it caused enough clamor to put the search for Martian life at the top of NASA’s agenda.

NASA put a plan in place. Rovers and orbiters would probe the planet to identify good places to look for evidence of life. Then a rover would head there to grab samples, and a third phase would bring them to Earth. In 2012, NASA announced the Mars 2020 mission, which would land a rover, later named Perseverance, to collect the samples. By 2030, a follow-up mission would collect these samples and return them to Earth at an estimated cost of slightly less than $6 billion. Perseverance launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida in July 2020. Not far behind, scientists hoped, the retrieval mission would follow.

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