Lee and other scientists discussed potential developing countries in Asia and Africa, as well as India and Chile, and their participation in planetary missions and future space endeavors, during an Oct. 4 conference at held at New York University (NYU). The gathering, sponsored by the local chapter of the National Space Society, NYUs Science and Environmental Reporting Program, SpaceEquity.com and the Space Transportation Association, also covered the value of remote sensing, space-based solar power and telecommunications to underdeveloped nations.

In addition to using space to benefit their local economies and populations, fledgling space programs, like those of Chile or India, have developed technology that could add to human efforts to reach Mars.

Indias space program began in 1975 with a satellite donated by NASA. Since then, the nation has added communication, meteorology and remote sensing satellites, as well as an assortment of launch vehicles, to its space program. While those programs seem rather standard in todays communications-saturated world, India has also developed a telemedicine system that uses a relay satellite to connect doctors in urban cities with fringe tribal and rural communities without access to modern health services.

"We are able to educate people about sicknesses like cholera and malaria remotely," said R.S. Bahtia, a counselor for space with the Indian Space Research Organisation. (IRSO). Experience with describing medical concepts and procedures from afar, he agreed, would be useful in a manned mission to Mars, where millions of miles of space and vacuum would separate astronauts and Earth doctors.

In South America, the Chilean Air Force assist planetary scientists in Antarctica by helping to store and maintain a wheeled robot that crawls along the ice shelf searching for meteorites, Pascal said. "We can accomplish these cooperative projects with the intellectual resources we have at hand," he told SPACE.com. "We dont have to build new universities or anything, just get people talking."

Many developing nations can participate in space exploration without even launching a single rocket, since astronauts planning a trip to Mars are going to need a place to practice in extreme environments.

Currently, Lee heads NASAs Haughton-Mars project to use the Haughton impact crater at Devon Island in the Canadian arctic as a simulated Mars landscape for future manned missions. However, the area is just one of a variety of environments future astronauts might find, Lee said, noting that vast expanses of Chinas Gobi Desert or the Sahara and Kalahari deserts in Africa, also offer analogs of the Red Planet.

Some of the smallest and remote countries can also hold beneath their soil geologic structures treasured by planetary scientists. The remains of craters, scars left by asteroid impacts over the eons, can help researcher learn Earths early years and provide a reference base for impact craters seen elsewhere in the Solar System.

Some are difficult to get to, such as one suspected buried in the sandy terrain of Roter Kamm, Namibia in Africas southern Kalahari Desert where access is restricted by armed guard watching over diamond mines in the area. Other countries, such as Cambodia, have been willing to work with researchers to learn more about their own geologic history. In 1992, Lee traipsed through Cambodia searching unsuccessfully for the suspected impact crater.

Space exploration has long been a symbol of national pride for many countries and a method of demonstrating technical prowess to the rest of the world. "The point here is that developing nations may be small, but they still have a stake in the rest of the world," Pascal said. "And besides, space belongs to nobody and therefore it belongs everybody."