We may be about to discover the fate of the Mars samples collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover.

On Tuesday, January 7 at 1:00 pm EST, NASA administrator Bill Nelson and associate administrator Nicky Fox are going to provide an update to the mission left in limbo. You can tune in live to the teleconference via the NASA website, or the livestream embedded below.

“The briefing,” NASA’s Jessica Taveau wrote in a media advisory, “will include NASA’s efforts to complete its goals of returning scientifically selected samples from Mars to Earth while lowering cost, risk, and mission complexity.”

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The joint ESA and NASA Mars Sample Return mission has been in trouble for some time now.

The mission itself began with the deployment of the Perseverance rover in February 2021. Part of Perseverance’s ongoing mission is to gather interesting samples of Martian rock. Those samples are currently in canisters on the surface of Mars, left to be collected later by another mission and returned to Earth.

In 2023, the future of the Mars sample return mission became shaky after an independent review determined that the program had “unrealistic budget and schedule expectations”, an “unwieldy structure” and was “not arranged to be led effectively”.

The House and Senate appropriations committees subsequently recommended a budget that included a cut of US$454,080,000 to NASA’s 2024 budget, specifically from the Mars Sample Return mission. NASA also reduced spending on the mission, and laid off a large number of workers and contractors from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is leading the mission.

This led to some alarm that the mission may be axed, leaving the canisters filled by Perseverance to remain on the surface of Mars for the foreseeable future. In April 2024, Nelson and Fox revealed that the mission had not been canned, and that the space agency was seeking a way forward that would both reduce the mission cost, and bring the sample to Earth earlier than 2040.

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In October 2024, NASA announced the assembly of a new team to assess the future of the Mars Sample Return mission, with a full report anticipated by the end of 2024.

Odds are good that the livestream will provide the findings of this report.

“To organize a mission at this level of complexity, we employ decades of lessons on how to run a large mission, including incorporating the input we get from conducting independent reviews,” Fox said in April 2024.

“Our next steps will position us to bring this transformational mission forward and deliver revolutionary science from Mars – providing critical new insights into the origins and evolution of Mars, our solar system, and life on Earth.”

Fingers crossed that the mission still stands.