If successful, the first three missions, blasting off before the end of the year, will place spacecraft on the Red Planet and in orbit for the first time since the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's highly successful Viking missions of the late 1970s. The opening salvo includes NASA's Mars Global Surveyor, to launch Wednesday, and the Mars Pathfinder mission, launching Dec. 2. Water is vital for life as human beings know it and, not inconsequentially, a natural resource that could be broken down to produce breathing air and rocket propellants for human explorers. Larger than the moon but smaller than Earth, Mars would be the first stop on a journey into the solar system's outer reaches. Past U.S. robotic missions reveal a desert-like world with a thin, cold atmosphere of carbon dioxide, a rocky, reddish surface, towering inactive volcanoes and an ugly gash that dwarfs Earth's Grand Canyon.
Ice caps come and go from the polar regions as the seasons change.
Experts believe that its disappearance accompanied a puzzling climate change. Surface geology appears as if it underwent a period of intense erosion followed by a long quiescent period. He believes that the answers can be coaxed from the Red Planet with the 10 missions envisioned by NASA, Russia and Japan over the next decade. The exploration program took on new significance in early August, when NASA researchers offered possible fossil evidence of ancient bacterial life buried within a meteorite suspected of being of Martian origin. Last week, British researchers announced similar findings in a considerably younger Martian meteorite also recovered from Earth's South Pole.