Finally, the French orbiter -- before entering Mars orbit -- would also release the "Netlanders", four little French landers to be scattered over the planet to serve as a seismic and weather network and make other geophysical measurements. (They would also carry cameras and copies of the tiny microphone lost on Mars Polar Lander.) The Netlanders are well under development; the only question now is just what carrier vehicle will finally take them to Mars.

The 2009 effort will be lower-key -- probably involving another orbiter. One likely possibility is a joint U.S.-Italian orbiter equipped to follow up the preliminary radar sounding carried out by Mars Express to look for layers of subsurface ice or patches of liquid water.

We don't yet know much about how well long-wavelength radar will penetrate Mars' surface, so it's uncertain how deeply the Mars Express instrument will really look -- and a later radar sounder can be redesigned accordingly. Synthetic-aperture radar might also be added to image Mars' actual rock surface below its upper few meters of windblown dust, which have covered over many of its ancient surface features.

Then, in 2011, the first sample-return mission will take off -- involving another smart lander, long-range rover, and French orbiter. The "Mars Ascent Vehicle" to blast the sample container back into low Mars orbit may weigh as little as 150 kg -- so there's a good chance that it will actually be mounted on the back of the rover itself, replacing half its science instruments and allowing the rover to avoid traipsing all the way back to the lander to launch its samples.

But the SSES strongly recommended that in that case, the lander should also be equipped with a blast shield that will allow it to survive the rocket's launch and continue its detailed survey of Mars' surface, perhaps for years afterwards.

The sample-return vehicle will return to Earth in early 2014 -- and, depending on the degree of unease about the possible danger of contaminating Earth with Mars germs, it would either parachute directly to Earth or brake itself into a low Earth orbit from which it could be retrieved by a Space Shuttle (which could carry this out in addition to other tasks on the same mission). JPL is carrying out a study of the latter possibility for the Johnson Space Center.

Also in 2011, a new set of Mars Scouts would be selected and launched, as part of the continuing search for good landing sites for later missions. In the new plan, the second Mars sample-return mission would very tentatively be flown only two years later -- although it could very easily be delayed.

Indeed, the entire plan is very tentative and flexible. Partly this is because -- as the SSES emphasized -- it's very unwise to plan out the exploration of a place so complex and full of unexpected scientific surprises as Mars for more than the next few years (and it must also be able to absorb the inevitable mission failures -- which is one reason why orbiters and landers tend to alternate in the plan, so that a failure won't delay the next launch two years later).

But it's also because that new additional dose of funds that NASA is currently promising to the Mars program could easily fall through. However, even if the U.S. Mars program continues to be funded at only the current rate, the new plan can be changed pretty smoothly to cope with it.

The 2005 orbiter and the 2007 and 2011 Mars Scouts would be flown on schedule, but the ambitious 2007 Smart Lander and its long-range rover would be delayed to 2009, and the first sample-return mission would be delayed to early 2014, with the sample returned in 2017. (The possible 2009 orbiter would probably be put on hold for some time.)

These delays will also be necessary if France pulls out of the program and the U.S. ends up having to build and test sample-retrieval Mars orbiters itself.

A two-year delay, however, is hardly disastrous -- and (as NASA seems to have learned and the SSES reemphasized at the meeting) thoroughness is better than haste in planning the retrieval of Martian surface samples, especially since fossil biological evidence is likely to be so scarce that the relatively few and expensive sample-return missions must be carefully targeted to the most scientifically promising landing sites.

The SSES did thoroughly insist that the groundwork for sample return must be very carefully laid this time in other ways, such as full funding for the sample quarantine facilities and for scientific data analysis even if this leads to some delays in the launch schedule.

There was even some discussion of the possibility that at some point -- if things go well and the new President is amenable -- NASA may end up with even more money for the program than the currently hoped-for increase.

If the 10-year program got $2 billion more, it could support the launch of two smart landers instead of one in 2007, and two sample-return landers in 2011 -- and it might even allow the sample return missions to be moved up to 2009.

However, Dr. David Stevenson suggested that if more funding does become available to the program, it should be used for more thorough in-situ surveying of Mars, rather than to speed up the first sample return.

In any case, the new proposed plan will undergo another 18 months of "programs system engineering" to confirm its feasibility before being officially adopted. But the SSES' reaction at the meeting was impressively unanimous in its approval.

Virtually all the committee's scientists agreed that this new plan -- while ambitious -- is infinitely better worked out, both in its funding requirements and its scientific pacing, than NASA's earlier hasty rush to a sample-return attempt. The only objections voiced by a couple of members were that the new plan might actually not be quite ambitious enough, and that the general public will become restless waiting for the first actual Mars sample to be returned to Earth.

Others, however, pointed out that properly designed in-situ Mars exploratory missions may very well themselves retain the interest of the public (like Pathfinder) -- and that the public is more likely to accept a moderate delay in the return of the first sample than it would be to accept the return of a hastily chosen sample which turns out to be useless for resolving the life-on-Mars question after $2 billion has been spent to retrieve it.

In short,although both the committee members and the NASA officials who testified to them emphasized that from now on the U.S. Mars exploration program will be monitored much more carefully than it was before -- lest it go astray again -- things look rather bright right now where Mars exploration is concerned.

Unfortunately, the same is most definitely not true for the hoped-for continued U.S. exploration of the outer Solar System in this decade -- including NASA's previously planned Pluto and Europa probes -- and, in fact, that program is at the moment in a flat-out survival crisis, which ended up occupying most of the SSES' time at the meeting. In my next report, I'll describe the problem and its possible solutions.

Back To Part One of this Report

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MARSDAILY

Deciding Where To Land
Cameron Park - Sept. 19, 2000
As outlined in the first two parts of this series, there is now a general consensus among Mars researchers that the U.S. Mars program must be redesigned to emphasize careful scientific reconnaissance of the planet in order to find the best possible sites on (or under) its surface to look for evidence of either fossil or "extant" (present-day) life.

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