LONDON: NASA employees have revealed details of a ‘budget’ plan to send a SpaceX capsule to the red planet in 2020 to return samples.
Elon Musk has backed the idea – and even tweeted images of what the mission would look like.
The ‘Red Dragon’ project was developed by a team at NASA.
It would grab samples collected by the space agency’s 202 rover and return them to Earth.
The sample-return effort would keep costs and complexity down by using SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket and a modified version of the company’s robotic Dragon cargo capsule, the concept’s developers say.
Red Dragon is ‘technically feasible with the use of these emerging commercial technologies, coupled with technologies that already exist,’ Andy Gonzales, of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said during a presentation with the space agency’s Future In-Space Operations (FISO) working group.
