“If I had a million dollars, I’d…” Many a wistful and wishful discussion begins with some version of that sentiment, uttered with the understanding that we’d put our good fortunes to good use. We’d travel, we’d invest, we’d retire. We wouldn’t, say, have a jewel embedded in our skull or fund hamster fights, to preview two of the following fiscal fiascos.

From the profligate to the unprofitable to the just plain stupid, here are ten examples of money most of us would have spent far more responsibly.

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10 Dunce of Diamonds

Any sentence that references rappers and jewelry is likely to detail a questionable-at-best expenditure, but this one takes the cak… uh, carat: Rapper Lil Uzi recently had a $24 million diamond implanted in his forehead.

His reason? He was worried that he’d misplace the jewel were it set in something more conventional, like a ring. So basically a guy who couldn’t trust himself to hang on to a $24 million ring trusted himself enough to have a $24 million diamond sewn into his head.

According to Simon Babaev of New York-based jeweler Eliantte & Co’s, Lil Uzi’s big diamond is secure because jewelers created a “specific mounting that clips and locks in place.” Instead of using stainless steel or surgical-grade steel, Babaev said the team did everything with precious metals. “There’s a whole mechanism involved, it’s not a standard piercing. A specific piece and part were both engineered with millimeter precision to get this put on him,” he said. That’s a lot of brainpower for something so brainless.

Reassuringly, Babaev insists that an expert team put their heads together before Gorilla Gluing a jewel into this humble gent’s head. “We made sure that prior to getting anything done that Uzi brought someone in to consult on everything. We didn’t just do this randomly.”

And don’t worry, said Babaev: the procedure is not dangerous. “As long as you maintain it well and have good upkeep, it’s perfectly fine. It’s as safe as any other piercing.” Babaev did not comment on the “safety” of someone inevitably cutting Lil Uzi’s head open while he sleeps to steal a $24 million diamond.

9 Brazil’s Ghost Stadium

The world has no shortage of poorly conceived stadiums. In England, libraries could be filled with the amount of copy dedicated to trashing London Stadium, home to the West Ham football club. Florida’s Tropicana Field is home to the Tampa Bay Rays, who play baseball in a domed stadium whose roof isn’t high enough for pop flies and is painted the color of (you guessed it) a baseball.

However, the most monetarily moronic venue in the world might be Brazil’s Arena da Amazonia. Conveniently located in the middle of the Amazon, the venue was constructed in advance in the 2014 World Cup at a cost of about $300 million. Testament to the country’s exemplary safety standards, three workers died during construction, which took an onerous four years.

Arena da Amazonia was used for four matches during the World Cup, then a few more soccer matches for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Since then, the 40,000-seat stadium typically draws fewer than 1,000 spectators for local matches. Its operating costs outpace its revenue more than threefold.

Arena da Amazonia certainly isn’t alone in its status as a money-wasting sports venue built to host a lone international event. Other such prestige infrastructure that now sit largely unused include Montreal’s funds-depleting Olympic Stadium and Beijing’s gaudy Bird’s Nest, the primary venue for the 2008 Summer Olympics.

8 Rodent Wrestling

For more than two decades, researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois received National Institutes of Health funding to watch hamsters fight each other. The project – which is probably even cooler if you’re stoned – was reportedly granted more than $3 million, including over $300,000 in 2015 alone. That’s a hell of a lot of rodent royal rumbles.

Some of these highly educational (and even more highly hilarious) experiments have involved a sort of home turf ‘roid rage test: hamsters were injected with steroids, then had another hamster placed in his cage to see if the drugged rodents were more aggressive when protecting their territory. In other contests, a teetotaling hamster was pitted against a combatant shot up with cocaine.

Other tests investigated whether becoming a “trained fighter” through two weeks of face-offs made the critters more aggressive. The study led to one of the greatest thesis headlines in academic history: “Prior fighting experience increases aggression in Syrian hamsters: implications for a role of dopamine in the winner effect.”

The experiments ceased after animal activists with no sense of humor pressured the university to eliminate the program. Unfortunately for the coked up hamsters, no funding was available for rodent rehab.

7 Crippling College Debt? Thy Name is Mudd

As in Harvey Mudd College of Claremont, California.

The two most expensive universities in the United States are (1) the University of Chicago and (2) Columbia. Both are top-ten academically accredited “write your own ticket” institutions, meaning a degree from either gives graduates such tremendous advantages that shelling out north of $300,000 for a four-year diploma turns into a sound investment.

The third most expensive college is another household name instantly recognizable for its academic excellen… oh wait, sorry. It’s Harvey Mudd College, a $79,539-per-year institution of higher learning that few people have ever heard of.

Granted, Harvey Mudd College has a specialty: its curriculum focuses largely on science and engineering. Still, plenty of colleges with more recognizable names offer such programs, without the risk of a would-be employer glancing at a graduate’s resume and thinking: “he went WHERE now?”

An honorable mention goes to Scripp’s College, an all-women’s school whose $77,588 annual tuition makes it the sixth most expensive in America despite a similar lack of notoriety.

6 A Legendary Box Office Disaster

In 2017, Warner Brothers Studios released “Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” an epic fantasy action/adventure film directed and co-written by Guy Ritchie. A tribute to the famous king and his Knights of the Round Table, Legend of the Sword was intended as the first of a six-movie series.

The goal was Fast & Furious on horseback – a Medieval answer to lucrative, long-running cinema franchises. To launch the endeavor, Warner Bros. gave Ritchie and his filmmaking team a long leash: a whopping $175 million production budget.

Critics weren’t sold. Legends of the Sword sports a dismal 30% approval rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, whose critical consensus reads, “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword piles mounds of modern action flash on an age-old tale – and wipes out much of what made it a classic story in the first place.”

The moviegoing public concurred. On its debut weekend in the US, Legends of the Sword finished third among all films, taking in just $15 million across 3,200 screens. That’s a lot of empty thrones in the theaters. The studio ultimately recouped just $25 million from its investment, making Legends of the Sword the most money-losing film of all time.

Rounding out the top three historic movie money-losers are (#2) 2003’s “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,” which lost $125 million; and (#3) 2012’s “John Carter,” which lost $122 million.

5 Dumpster Diving for Dividends

In 2013, James Howells, an IT worker living in the UK, was cleaning out his house. He had two identical hard drives, and figured he could stand to part with one. He drove to the landfill in Newport, South Wales and discarded it.

Howells was an early adopter of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Amassing 7,500 bitcoins when it was new and inexpensive, he’d stashed his crypto-cash onto a hard drive as an investment. Fortunately for Howells, by 2013 each bitcoin was worth $17,000, meaning he was cyber-sitting on a nest egg of over $125 million.

Unfortunately for Howells, the cryptographic “private key” needed to access his bitcoin windfall was in… you guessed it… the hard drive he’d just dropped at a landfill.

Eight years later, Howells’ trashed trove is worth an eye-popping $280 million. To this day, local authorities have refused his pleas to search the landfill in search of his buried treasure, citing environmental and funding concerns. Attempting to alleviate the latter issue, Howells has offered to donate 25% of the haul — some $71 million — to a “Covid Relief Fund” for the city if he manages to dig up the hard drive.

As of late January, the Newport City Council has rejected Howells’ nine-figure scavenger hunt, with no signs of budging. “The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds, without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order,” a town council spokesman said. Howells, it seems, is shit-coin out of luck.

4 So Dumb They Made It A Day

The most celebrated day in American sports is April 15. That’s the date in 1947 that Jackie Robinson took the field as a Brooklyn Dodger, breaking baseball’s color barrier and truly making the game America’s national pastime.

The most mocked day in American sports is probably July 1. That’s the day that, each year, the New York Mets pay a player more than a million dollars… despite the fact that he hasn’t played a game this CENTURY.

The story goes like this: By 1999, the Mets had pretty most had it with Bobby Bonilla, a big-money bust who never lived up to his hype. The team decided to part ways with the aging third baseman, despite still owing him $5.9 million for the upcoming 2000 season.

But instead of simply buying out his contract and being done with him, the Mets opted for an arcane agreement in which payments would be deferred until 2011, as if $6 million would make or break a franchise worth half a billion bucks per 2002 figures.

The deferment included an 8% annual interest accruement. As a result, Bonilla has received about $1 million each July 1 – known throughout baseball as Bobby Bonilla Day – since 2011, and will continue to receive annual instalments until 2035. Upon the deal’s completion, Bonilla will be 72 years old and the Mets will have paid out nearly $30 million to defer $5.9 million.

3 Bloomberg or Bust

It was late 2019 and, in the US, things weren’t going well for the Democratic Party establishment. The assumed frontrunner, former Vice President Joe Biden, was underperforming in both debates and polls, opening the door for Socialist Bernie Sanders to have a path to the presidential nomination.

So onto the political scene strode a towering 5’6” billionaire: media magnate Michael Bloomberg. So centrist that he was a Republican during his three terms as mayor of New York City, Bloomberg devised an unconventional primary strategy: not to compete in the four states with February primaries, but rather focus on Super Tuesday – a date in early March when more than a dozen states vote.

What followed was the most saturating media blitz in the history of politics, American or otherwise. Bloomberg spent $188 million in the 4th quarter of 2019, including $132 million on television ads and $8.2 million on digital platforms. By February, the price tag had exceeded HALF A BILLION dollars – easily the most expensive primary campaign ever.

Unfortunately for Mayor Mike, no one was buying it. Bloomberg finished no higher than third place in any of the 14 Super Tuesday contests, and suspended his campaign shortly thereafter. In the apportioned system of Democratic primary voting, that gave Bloomberg a pathetic 58 of the 1,991 delegates needed to secure the nomination. That translates to
$17,241,379 per delegate.

2 Fast Track to the Poorhouse

In 2008, California announced an ambitious project: a decade-long infrastructure initiative to link its two most prominent cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, by high-speed rail. The effort was intended to provide an eco-friendly alternative to flying between the southern and northern hubs of the expansive state, and to help close the bullet train gap between the US and other developed nations.

The 2008 price tag was eye-popping: $33 billion, with service commencing in 2020. Cost-benefit questions abounded, including the wisdom of a high-speed rail station in Los Angeles, the most spread out and therefore car-centric city in the country.

Of course, 2020 has now come and (thankfully) gone, with no high-speed rail service in sight. California being California – a red-tape draped state where committees, permits and legal entanglements cause notorious delays – the project’s estimated cost now exceeds $100 billion, with an uncertain completion date.

That works out to about $192 million per mile for the 520-mile rail service. This for a project with no easily-converted customers – Californians have little history with rail ridership, precisely because of the state’s enormity – in a state that is currently $575 billion in debt.

1 A Trillion-dollar Paperweight

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a… wait, yeah it’s a plane. Only it doesn’t go anywhere and cost more than a TRILLION dollars to develop. In late February, the US Air Force admitted what had long been suspected: a warplane more than two decades in the making was a dud.

In the 1990s, the Air Force began designing a next-generation fighter jet designed to be lighter and more sophisticated than its predecessors. The goal was to replace the existing fleet of Cold War-era F-16 fighter planes.

Then the USA’s notorious military industrial complex happened. Over (far too much) time, the lightweight replacement fighter got heavier and more expensive as the Air Force and lead contractor Lockheed Martin packed it with an endless array of bells and whistles. Twenty years later the slow, clunky 25-ton “stealth” aircraft has become the very problem it was intended to solve.

“They tried to make the F-35 do too much,” under-stated Dan Grazier, an analyst with the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C. The final price tag for this bloated bust approached an astounding $1.7 TRILLION. That’s enough to give each of the more than 330 million living Americans $5,000 in cash.

Up next is more of the same: In a profligate nod to 90s nostalgia, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown Jr. just announced plans to design a lightweight fighter jet to replace the existing fleet of Cold War-era F-16s. See ya in 2040, General.

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The Perseverance has landed. On February 18, NASA’s most ambitious rover to date competed a nearly seven-month journey from Earth to begin a years-long exploration of the red planet.

Weighing a metric ton and costing more than $2 billion to design, construct and validate, Perseverance has one overarching goal: finding unprecedented evidence of ancient life on a planet other than ours. Much like the moon landing more then half a century earlier, it is a feel-good example of mankind’s ingenuity during especially trying times.

Here are ten terrific facts about Perseverance’s mission to Mars.

10 Seven Minutes in Hell

Fortunately for the Perseverance team, the hardest part of the mission is already behind them. This difficulty is twofold: the challenges of landing a rover on another planet, and its human controllers’ complete inability to do anything to assist.

As demonstrated in previous Martian missions, it takes approximately seven minutes for the vehicle to touch down on the surface from the time it enters the planet’s atmosphere traveling 12.000 mph. The high-velocity descent, combined with the 11 minutes it takes radio signals to travel between Earth and Mars, means the NASA crew can do nothing more than wait and pray.

NASA calls this the “seven minutes of terror,” where the combination of high risk and human helplessness leaves everyone in the control room wondering whether years of building the most sophisticated rover in history will come to an abrupt, fruitless end via crash.

Perseverance had two other factors working against it. First, at a metric ton, it is easily the heaviest rover NASA had ever attempted to land on Mars. Second, its destination – the Jezero Crater, perceived as the likeliest place to find signs of ancient microbial life – is a high-risk/high-reward choice pocked with boulders and steep cliffs.

Luckily Perseverance persevered, aided by two new technologies its predecessors lacked. One, a range trigger, allows the rover to decide precisely when to deploy its 70-foot parachute. The other, called terrain relative navigation, essentially gives Perseverance eyes and a map to ensure it touches down safely. Allen Chen, the leader of the mission’s Entry, Descent and Landing team, doubts Jezero Crater would have been a feasible landing spot were it not for these two advancements.

9 Looking for Life in All the Right Places

As explained by then-NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine before last year’s launch, Perseverance stands as “the first time in history where we’re going to go to Mars with an explicit mission to find life on another world — ancient life on Mars.”

Indeed, the landing site was chosen with discovering evidence of life on Mars – past or present – top of mind. Perseverance touched down on Mars’ 28-mile-wide Jezero Crater, which scientists believe once held a body of water approximately the size of Lake Tahoe. Jezero also has a major channel stemming from it, which suggests that water once flowed freely to or from the ancient lake. Judging by the crater’s depth, the lake it once held was likely hundreds of feet deep.

All this water movement causes what for life-seeking scientists is a very compelling occurrence: sediment deposits across the broad delta of the crater’s bowl-like floor. If microbial life ever existed on Mars, one of its likeliest locales was right here. The reasoning is that the earliest forms of life on Earth occurred in similar scenarios some 3.5 billion years ago – when, scientists believe, Mars still had ample flowing water.

Perseverance’s primary mission is to find the sort of telltale “biosignatures” that, if life did once exist on Mars, are likely to be dispersed in layered deposits throughout Jezero Crater’s floor. In doing so, it may provide a definitive answer of whether Earth is the sole source of life in our solar system.

8 Space Helicopter?

Yes, space helicopter. Along for the 300,000,000-mile ride with Perseverance is the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter. Weighing all of four pounds, the little guy isn’t much more than a four-legged flying camera.

More than anything, Ingenuity is an interplanetary test flight. Its chief purpose is to prove that a helicopter can fly in Mars’ extremely thin atmosphere – a feat that demands exponentially more lift. For that reason, Ingenuity features four specially made carbon-fiber blades, arranged into two rotors that spin in opposite directions at around 2,400 rpm – many times faster than a helicopter on Earth. The cold is another challenge. Nighttime temperatures on Mars plunge to -90° C, which will push the tolerability limits of Ingenuity’s components.

The inability to control Ingenuity in real-time poses another obstacle. While Perseverance moves very deliberately along the ground, a flying instrument like Ingenuity makes it impossible to steer with a joystick, since command signals take so long to reach Mars. As a result, Ingenuity will take orders in advance, then take off largely on its own volition. It is also responsible for autonomously charging itself using its solar panel – a task Perseverance doesn’t need to undertake because of its novel nuclear battery.

As if being the first object to fly on a distant planet wasn’t enough, Ingenuity has another task: surveillance. The copter carries a high resolution downward-looking camera that, in addition to helping it navigate, can survey, for example, the ground immediately over a hill. The goal is ascertaining potential points of interest for the intentionally slow-moving Perseverance rover to analyze.

7 Armed and Ready

Perseverance’s most prominent feature is its sophisticated, seven-foot robotic arm. Designed to mimic a human appendage for intuitive control from Earth, Perseverance’s exemplary extension comes complete with a shoulder, elbow, and rotating “wrist.” It even has a gripper that functions, as much as possible, as a human hand would – a robotized remake of the greatest tool Mother Nature ever invented.

Perseverance’s arm can reach the vast majority of its science-centric parts, enabling it to efficiently access its “hand tools” to extract core samples from the ground, take microscopic images of its surroundings, and analyze the elemental composition and mineral makeup of Martian rocks and soil.

Its rotary percussive drill is particularly impressive. The sophisticated tool – made possible in part by Perseverance’s turret-like hand – uses rotary motion to penetrate the Martian surface and collect its precious samples. Equipped with an assortment of drill bits for various purposes – including those specifically for scraping off top layers to expose subcutaneous areas – the self-sealing system is deposited by the robotic arm directly into collection tubes.

Another of the arm’s sampling devices is PIXL, which seeks out changes in textures and chemicals in Martian rocks and soil, in an effort to detect signs of ancient life. PIXL will study candidate specimens to help determine which ones are the most scientifically interesting targets for further examination.

6 Listen Up

Perseverance is equipped with a pair of sophisticated, highly detailed microphones. They are the first ever sent to another planet, and offer NASA its first-ever ability to eavesdrop on our galactic next-door neighbor. First and foremost, the rover will be recording the whistling Martian winds – which are notoriously strong, and whose propensity for kicking up dust actually ended a previous rover’s usefulness by covering its solar panels irreversibly.

Perseverance also will be listening to… well, itself. The crunch of its wheels rolling across the surface will not only provide evidence if the rover’s continued viability, but also may offer certain insight into Martian soil composition.

Notably, it’s possible that Perseverance’s arrival also was detected by a fellow spacecraft. In 2018, NASA landed the InSight probe about some 3,500 km (2,200 miles) away. InSight features a seismometer to track for earthquakes – or rather, marsquakes – shaking the ground. Scientists believe there’s a chance the probe may feel Perseverance land on Mars.

It would be the first seismic detection of a known impact on another planet, and could reveal more information about the Martian interior, since such waves can help map geological features underground. Unfortunately, as of a few days before Perseverance’s arrival, InSight’s capabilities were diminished due to dust build-up on its solar panels. Details on whether it “heard” its sister explorer touch down should be available soon.

5 Nuclear Battery

To avoid the wind-blown fate of its predecessor – whose solar panels were covered in soil by a Martian dust storm, permanently paralyzing it through energy depletion – Perseverance has a novel power generation device: a nuclear battery.

Perseverance is powered by a Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (MMRTG), provided to NASA by the U.S. Department of Energy. The 99-pound MMRTG converts heat from the natural radioactive decay of more than ten pounds of plutonium-238 into a steady flow of electricity. It will produce about 110 watts at the start of Perseverance’s mission, then decrease only a few percentage points per year.

The MMRTG also charges two lithium-ion batteries, which are used during daily operations and when demand temporarily exceeds the usual electrical output levels. This is especially necessary during Perseverance’s groundbreaking drilling, soil sampling and collection operations, which can demand up to 900 watts.

In addition to powering Perseverance, the MMRTG performs another useful function: its excess heat will keep the rover’s myriad tools and systems at tolerable operating temperatures. While imperfect, it’s a decided step up from having a mission be imperiled by inclement weather.

4 The Next Step Toward Manned Missions: Oxygen Creation

Besides its search for ancient life, perhaps Perseverance’s most significant task is its efforts to prepare for human exploration of Mars. On that front, the mission’s most ambitious initiative is the Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment, better known as MOXIE.

MOXIE’s mission is to demonstrate how astronauts might one day produce oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. The 37-pound, car battery-sized MOXIE makes oxygen much like a tree does: it “inhales” carbon dioxide (Mars’ atmosphere is about 96% carbon dioxide) and “exhales” oxygen. This oxygen would be necessary not only for (of course) breathing, but also as a propellant, since any manned mission would need a means of rocketing off the red planet to return to Earth.

A nod to conserving Perseverance’s limited power supply for other efforts, its goals are fairly modest: MOXIE will conduct hour-long sessions intermittently, attempting to produce about 10 grams – or 0.022 lbs – of oxygen per experiment.

To put that in perspective, to launch off Mars, human explorers would need 33 to 50 tons of fuel, about the weight of a space shuttle. Scientists think that any system capable of providing a significant portion of such oxygen would need to be at least 100 times larger than MOXIE, which is essentially its own miniature gas factory.

3 What’s Old Is New

Somewhat ironically, some aspects of the most expensive, sophisticated rover ever constructed rely on technology from the 1990s.

For example, Perseverance features a radiation-hardened version of an IBM PowerPC microprocessor called the RAD750. Originally designed by Motorola and IBM, it is primarily used in satellites and avionics – and basically has the power of a circa-1992 Pentium 1 chip. The system is responsible for handling the entire avionics architecture of the rover designed and programmed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Why this seemingly antiquated technology? Because it’s battle-tested.

“The closer you pack your transistors, the more susceptible to radiation you get,” said Richard Rieber, a JPL mobility flight systems engineer. “With space hardware, you need high reliability, and the RAD750 has had a couple of hundred missions in space.”

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it—especially when building an unprecedented vehicle with countless other issues to address. The old school RAD750 computer works in tandem with a series of field programmable gate array (FPGA) computers to control the rover’s drivetrain, wheels, suspension and cameras.

One FPGA, a Virtex-5, is also a bit technologically dated – but trustworthy enough to have drawn a mission-critical straw: the module assisted in Perseverance’s successful atmospheric entry, descent and landing. Now that Perseverance is on the ground, this computer system will be reprogrammed from Earth to perform mobility visual processing.

2 Sending Mementos to Mars

For decades, NASA has engaged in festooning – adding fun extras to spacecraft and rovers launched into the heavens. Perseverance is no exception.

For starters, the rover carries three microchips with nearly 11 million names, part of NASA’s uncreatively-dubbed “Send Your Name To Mars” campaign. This represents a ninefold increase from the last rover, Curiosity, which took about 1.2 million Earth names to the red planet. Perseverance also brought a tribute to the healthcare workers battling the COVID-19 pandemic, as its July 2020 launch occurred a few months after the crisis’ inception.

Other accessories are part functional, part fun. For example, Perseverance’s Mastcam-Z is a zoomable panoramic camera that also carries a greeting to potential non-Earthlings. It reads: “Are we alone? We came here to look for signs of life, and to collect samples of Mars for study on Earth. To those who follow, we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery.”

Perhaps the coolest of Perseverance’s extravagances is a special coin made from astronaut helmet-visor materials – a nod to geocaching, the nerdgasmic practice of using GPS to hide and find buried treasure. The coin is part of the calibration target for the SHERLOC (Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals) instrument, and is etched with the address of its narrative namesake: 221b Baker Street, London, England.

1 A Very Special Delivery

Hopefully, Perseverance will save its most significant gift to mankind for last: a decade from now, the goal is to have soil samples taken by the rover arrive back on Earth. The ambitious plan, known as Mars Sample Return, involves three missions over the coming ten years.

Like its predecessor, Curiosity, Perseverance features an on-board laboratory. But unlike its forebears, Perseverance is equipped with a sophisticated sampling system that captures and packs Martian rocks and soil for an unprecedented journey back to Earth.

For the next two years, Perseverance will obtain samples using a drill bit that cuts cylindrical cores into the surface, gathering a cross-section of soil. The deeper the sample, the further back in time it represents – just like Earth.

After collecting and sealing about 40 core samples, Perseverance will do something strange: set them down and roll away. Later in the decade, a joint NASA-European Space Agency mission will launch the aptly named Sample Retriever Lander to fetch Perseverance’s goodies. The vehicle will grab the samples, pack it into a rocket and blast it into the heavens – the first launch ever attempted from another planet.

The rocket will then drop its basketball-sized package into orbit around the red planet. Completing the interplanetary relay race, the massive Earth Return Orbiter, which is as large as an airplane, will snatch the samples from Mars’ orbit and carry them back to Earth. The delivery may very well contain signs of ancient alien life, marking the most incredible accomplishment in space exploration to date.