| Humankind has successfully sent more than two dozen spacecraft to Mars, but we've never brought one back home to Earth. NASA would like to change that. As G. Ryan Faith writes this week on Backchannel, the goal of the Mars Sample Return mission is to land a spacecraft on the Red Planet, deploy a rover to scoop up some Martian dirt, then blast off from Mars and fly safely back to Earth with the payload. As Faith explains, the Earthlings in charge of the project—a partnership with the European Space Agency that will lift off sometime in the 2030s—are giddy over the prospect of getting Martian soil into the lab. "A single sample … will change how we think about everything," says Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for science. The analysis you can do in an Earth-based lab vastly overshadows what is possible using remote-controlled equipment on the surface of Mars. According to Zrbuchen, the sample " will be the most valuable thing on Earth." The project promises to answer a question that humans have wondered about since we first gazed up into the night sky: Is there life out there? And if there is, does it tend to crop up whenever the conditions for it are about right? Or is it vanishingly rare? The answers are just a round trip away. Mark Robinson | Features Editor, WIRED | 
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