How Mars 2020 Will Help Bring Part of the Red Planet Back to Earth February 9, 2021Caltech Out in the cold, empty void beyond Earth, NASA’s latest Mars mission is hurtling at 43,000 miles per hour toward the Red Planet. The mission, Mars 2020, passed the halfway point of its journey in October 2020 and is expected to touch down on solid ground on February 18. The mission is the first part of an audacious plan to do something humanity has never done before: bring a piece of another planet back to Earth. (NASA has retrieved rocks from the Moon, but it is not considered a planet.) This plan, known as Mars Sample Return, will involve three missions spanning a decade.