• NASA scrapped its $11 billion plan to return samples from Mars to Earth by 2040.
• It now has not one but two new options to choose from — both are faster and cheaper.
• The samples could return as soon as 2035 and may contain the first-ever signs of ancient alien life.

The Perseverance rover is building up a stash of rocks on Mars that could contain the first-ever signs of alien life, but NASA is scrambling to figure out how it will bring them back to Earth for analysis.

NASA had a plan but it got "out of control," in the words of the agency's administrator, Bill Nelson. After a series of delays, the cost ballooned to $11 billion and the samples wouldn't be landing on Earth until 2040.

So Nelson scrapped that plan in April and called for new proposals from outside and within NASA.

After months of assessment, on Tuesday, Nelson announced that "the wizards at NASA" had come up with a new plan, which could bring the Mars rocks to Earth as early as 2035 for as cheap as $5.8 billion.

"We want to have the quickest, cheapest way to get these 30 samples back," Nelson said during a NASA presser on Tuesday.

For that to work, he said the incoming Trump administration will need to get on board.

"This is going to be a function of the new administration in order to fund this," Nelson said. "And it's an appropriation that has to start right now, fiscal year '25."

The search for alien life on Mars

NASA is not looking for active alien life but rather fossilized hints of long-gone microbial life.

The $2.4 billion Perseverance rover has spent the last four years exploring Jezero Crater, which was a lake billions of years ago. If microbes ever lived on Mars, this is the ideal spot to search for evidence of them.

In fact, in July, Perseverance stumbled on a rock in Jezero Crater that contained some of the strongest potential evidence of ancient alien life to date.

One of the rock's outstanding features was tiny white "leopard spots" that could suggest the presence of chemical reactions similar to those associated with microbial life on Earth.

It's still uncertain whether this is truly a sign of alien microbes. There could be non-biological explanations for the spots. To check, NASA needs to get that rock here to Earth for study in laboratories.

NASA's new plan

Bringing Perseverance's Mars samples to Earth will be complicated.

NASA must launch a mission that collects the samples from the Martian surface and launches them into Mars' orbit, where they must meet up with a European spacecraft designed to grab them and carry them back to Earth.

To make things simpler and reduce costs, NASA focused on how it would drop that mission to the Martian surface.

In order to maximize the chance of the sample return mission moving forward, NASA chose not one but two options to pursue.

The first option would involve using existing technology that's previously landed on Mars. That's a sky crane, similar to the ones that helped lower NASA's Curiosity and Perseverance rovers on Mars' surface.

The second option involves working with existing commercial partners, like SpaceX and Blue Origin. In that scenario, NASA would use new commercial technology, untested on Mars, like a heavy lander, Nelson said.

Both paths would cost around $6 or $7 billion and deliver the samples to Earth before 2040, NASA determined.

Nelson said he expects NASA to choose one of those paths forward in 2026 since the engineering work required to fully understand each option will take about a year.

He added that NASA will need $300 million to do that work in fiscal year 2025. Trump would have to include that expense in his budget proposal, and Congress would have to approve it.

"And if they want to get this thing back on a direct return earlier, they're going to have to put more money into it, even more than $300 million in fiscal year 25. And that would be the case every year going forward," Nelson said.

As part of the transition to the new Trump administration, Nelson will likely be handing the agency over to Trump-nominee Jared Isaacman, a billionaire and two-time SpaceX astronaut.

After Trump nominated him for NASA Administrator, Isaacman wrote in a post on X that "Americans will walk on the Moon and Mars."

His position on the Mars Sample Return mission is unclear. Nelson said he had not spoken with Isaacman about it.

• A 65-year-old patient has died of bird flu, Louisiana officials reported on Monday.
• The patient had underlying conditions and was likely infected by exposure to birds.
• This is the first death linked to the current outbreak of H5N1, avian influenza.

Bird flu has claimed its first human death in the US.

A Louisiana patient died from a severe case of the H5N1 avian influenza, state health officials reported on Monday.

The patient, who was over 65 and had underlying conditions, is the only human case of H5N1 in Louisiana.

There is still no sign that the H5N1 virus can spread between people. The Louisiana patient contracted the virus after exposure to wild birds and a non-commercial backyard flock, officials reported.

The bird flu's proliferation through bird and animal populations worldwide has led to many human spillover cases over the years. There have been 939 cases of human H5N1 infections worldwide as of November 2024, according to the World Health Organization. Of those, 464 were fatal.

"I think it's pretty clear that we will continue to see severe disease," Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude and director of the WHO animal and bird flu center, told Business Insider. "I guess the real question is are we going to see more? I don't know the answer to that one."

A new variant of H5N1 with concerning mutations

The Louisiana patient, who was hospitalized in late 2024, carried a new version of bird flu, which is unlike the bird flu that has been spreading in cattle across the US, the CDC reported. A teenager in Canada, who was hospitalized with severe bird flu in November, also carried that new version, which is called the D1.1 genotype.

Public-health experts are concerned that H5N1 could develop mutations that allow it to adapt better to infecting mammals. That could set the virus on a path to human-to-human transmission.

Webby said samples of the D1.1 genotype virus "did look like they were starting to develop some of those mutations" after infecting the Louisiana and Canada patients.

Fortunately, the mutated virus did not appear to pass from those two patients to other people.

"To be honest, the last month, six weeks, have made me a little more uneasy about the situation," Webby said.

The Louisiana Department of Health said in its report that the public health risk for the general public remains low, but "people who work with birds, poultry or cows, or have recreational exposure to them, are at higher risk."

Still, Webby said the Louisiana case shows that "the risk of catching this virus is not just for those that are in a milking parlor in California," who are some of the most at-risk due to the widespread outbreak in the state's cattle.

Rather, he said, "anywhere where there's birds, there is a risk to individuals who are in contact with those birds."