¶NASA and ESA have outlined their Mars sample return plans. At the Ninth International Conference on Mars, officials from NASA and ESA provided concrete details about their upcoming joint Mars sample return mission. First, NASA's Mars 2020 rover (which just finished assembly) is going to cache samples in canisters as it wanders about. Then, in 2026, two spacecraft, the Earth-Return Orbiter (ERO), built by ESA, and the Sample Retrieval Lander (SRL), built in partnership by NASA and ESA, will launch independently. The lander will take an unusually slow trip to Mars so that it arrives in August 2028 during Mars' northern spring equinox when solar-panel-blotting dust is expected to be at a minimum. It will land and spend the next 6 mo transferring Mars 2020’s samples, then launch them into orbit on a small rocket. Meanwhile, ESA's large solar electric Earth-return orbiter will have entered and circularized its Martian orbit using ion propulsion so that it can track down and capture the now orbiting samples in 2029, followed by a slow orbit-raising maneuver which will finally bring them home in 2032 (probably to the Utah Test Range where Genesis and Stardust also landed/lithobraked). However, all of this is a proposal—reality will depend on future NASA and ESA budgets. The Planetary Society has an excellent drill-down that goes into more detail, including covering concerns around a sample return mission absorbing budget from other Mars programs and the mission’s dependence on NASA's aging Mars observation and data relay craft.