ever taken from another planet.
The contracts, each valued at $1 million, were announced late Monday by NASA's Mars Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., a unit of
NASA has asked the companies to come up with broad proposals for every phase of an unmanned round trip to Mars, a mission which might be launched as early as 2011.
``We want to get new ideas,'' said Mary Hardin a spokesman for JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology. ``How do we get to the surface? How do we collect the sample? How do we get it back?''
The deadline for the private sector engineers to present their initial proposals is October, Hardin said. After that, NASA will select one or more of the ideas for further study, she said.
Earlier this month, NASA launched the unmanned
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