Other highlights in the coming months include the launch of robot scouts to Mars and Venus, a US mission to smash open a passing comet and the test flight of a monster 10-tonne rocket.

The United States and China are scheduled to resume manned space flights, while Europe is due to deploy its first satellite in a navigational constellation designed to rival the US Global Positioning System (GPS).

In science, Earth's two closest neighbours are to come under scrutiny after the deep-space heroics on distant Titan.

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, due for launch in August, should powerfully add to the army of explorers - two US and European probes and two US rovers - which are sniffing around the Red Planet, searching to answer the mysteries of its lost water and atmosphere.

Venus, a hell with fiery heat and an atmosphere of acid, will be visited for the first time in a decade.

The European Space Agency's Venus Express probe, set to take off in October, could confirm suspicions that the planet known as the Evening Star fell victim to runaway global warming.

On July 4, a novel US probe, Deep Impact, is to rendezvous in deep space with the comet Tempel 1, and fire a metal slug into its heart - a gigantic, soundless wack whose results should be visible from Earth as a whitish cloud.

But it's not an act of cosmic vandalism: the idea is to find out more about comets - the intriguing, primitive rubble left over from the building of the Solar System. The outcome will also give invaluable tips as to how Earth could destroy or deviate any asteroid on a future collision course.

These missions are all very different but they share one important thing - they are born of the "faster, quicker, cheaper" doctrine of robotic exploration, says Doug Millard, curator of space technology at Britain's Science Museum.

"We won't see the like of Cassini-Huygens again," he said, referring to the US-European mission to Titan.

"That was the last of the very big multi-billion-pound (-dollar, -euro) missions. It was a throwback to the Voyager, Pioneer era, the vanguard of the US space exploration programme of the 1960s and 70s. In those days, you built two spacecraft just in case one went wrong. Those days have long gone."

Closer to home, fingers will be crossed when the US spaceship Discovery resumes flights by the shuttle fleet after the catastrophic loss of its sister craft, Columbia, on February 1, 2003. The gingerly-prepared mission has a May or June launch window.

Late in the year, China is expected to launch Shenzhou VI, the second manned flight in its secrecy-shrouded space programme.

Europe, too, will be seeking to make its mark in orbital operations.

Next month will see the test launch of its Ariane 5 ECA, a behemoth with a 10-tonne payload. The first attempt went disastrously wrong when the rocket self-destructed over the Atlantic in December 2002.

And in November, Europe is scheduled to launch the first Galileo satellite, creating a navigational web in orbit that is promised to outperform the GPS in terms of accuracy and become the leading tool in traffic management.

Space policymakers in Europe and elsewhere will spend much of 2005 debating how far to join the United States in President George W. Bush's goal, sketched in January 2004, of resuming human missions to the Moon and thence to Mars.

ESA Science Director David Southwood said a major question was whether it was right to invest so much money on exploring the Red Planet.

"Is real progress going to be made doing things on Mars and sending people to Mars, or is it a broader exploration [of the Solar System] that is needed?" he said in an interview.

All rights reserved. � 2004 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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