[dotnet00]

China as far I'm aware doesn't have any solid plans on the books yet. NASA has been working on planning out a Mars sample return for a few years now, part of the Perseverance rover's job is to collect samples, store them in canisters, and drop them for future retrieval. This ensures that the samples have a much lower risk of having been contaminated, if, say, they end up being retrieved by a crewed mission.

The issue has been that previous proposals have all been too complex and too expensive, eg, a second rover that has to retrieve the samples and then place them on a lander which has a rocket on-board, the rocket then launches back into orbit, where an orbiter picks up it up and brings it home.

They've recently started soliciting other ideas for a way it might be done from private industry. The most promising in my opinion being to use a Starship, so they would be able to send a large enough return rocket to not need an orbital rendezvous, significantly simplifying things. I doubt they're seriously proposing a crewed Starship sample retrieval just yet. Another neat proposal I've heard is to build on the success of the Ingenuity helicopter to have a bunch of similar helicopters go around picking up the samples instead of a rover.

[DaoVeles]

It is such a classic issue with space travel. One way trip is relatively easy, return trips are WAY more difficult because of the reasons listed.

China has a plan to get an orbiting probe to Neptune but nothing about returning Mars samples. Highlights the different scale of the problem.

[standardUser]

Excellent info, thank you. If you or anyone else have favorite news sources for keeping up on space programs, please share. I tend to get most of my space news from HN.

[dotnet00]

I usually just pick it up from X, following a couple of good, space focused journalists helps push most space news up to me.

Adding to the Mars Sample Return thing, apparently China just recently announced their intention to do it ~2030.