Ten years after the inaugural conference the 2nd International Mars Sample Return Conference (MRS) was held in the German capital from 25 to 27 April, co-hosted by ESA and CNES in cooperation with NASA and the International Mars Exploration Working Group (IMEWG) and attracting over 200 participants, including GMV.

The conference served as a forum for debating the best options for international cooperation in Mars exploration, including sample-return missions. The Mars Sample Return mission represents a great stride forward in exploration of the red planet. As its name suggests, its remit is not only to retrieve Mars samples but also bring them back to Earth, the latter leg representing a new challenge for industry, the science community and space agencies.

The three-day conference looked into all the key aspects of this unprecedented mission: the lessons learned from past missions, the scientific reasons for bringing Mars samples back to Earth, the possible architecture concepts for the future Mars Sample Return mission, the status of the necessary technology for carrying it out, the best solutions for avoiding contamination of Martian samples in terms of analysis and conservation infrastructure and, lastly, the most efficient mission-planning procedure.

During the conference GMV presented two papers, one on groundbreaking rover architecture solutions in future planetary missions, and the other dealing with image-processing and GNC algorithms for autonomous robot missions such as MSR.

GMV is currently working on various ESA projects within the Mars Sample Return mission, such as mission analysis and the guidance, navigation and control (GNC) system both for the rendezvous and rover phases.