The Daily Hallucination

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA has formally ended its Mars Sample Return mission, leaving the sealed tubes of rock and soil carefully collected by the Perseverance rover sitting on the surface of Mars with no plan to bring them home, in what engineers are describing as the most expensive items ever left at a pickup counter.

"The samples are safe, sealed and labeled," said a spokesperson for the agency. "They are exactly where we left them. We know precisely where they are. We are simply not going there."

The tubes, which the rover spent years collecting and arranging in a neat depot on the Martian surface, were intended to be retrieved by a later mission and flown back to Earth. According to an internal estimate cited by a person familiar with the program, each tube cost roughly $140 million to fill, making them, by weight, the most valuable dirt in history, and currently the most valuable dirt nobody is coming for.

"We did everything right," said Gwendolyn Esterhuizen-Tapp, a planetary scientist who worked on sample selection. "We picked the most promising rocks. We sealed them properly. We wrote down where they were. It is like carefully packing a suitcase, taking it to the airport, and then deciding not to go on the trip, except the suitcase is 140 million miles away."

Other space agencies have signaled interest. China's planned Tianwen-3 mission, currently scheduled to launch around 2028, is designed to collect its own samples from Mars, raising the possibility that another country will return from the planet with rocks while the American ones remain on a shelf nearby.

"There is nothing in international law about taking someone else's tubes," said a space policy analyst who asked not to be named. "There is also nothing about leaving a polite note."

At press time, the Perseverance rover had driven back past the depot and, according to mission logs, paused.