mars_roadmap_000920 LONG BEACH, Calif.
NASA is just weeks away from unveiling its revamped 20-year vision for exploring Mars, a document that promises to teach new dogs old tricks.The reconfigured plan sparked by the losses of the
Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander spacecraft last year will keep the agencys long-established goals for the Red Planet intact. Paramount among those is the hunt for water, and what it means for life, resources, geology and climate on Mars. But how NASA pieces together its Martian hunting party will change, the result of a bottom-up redraft of its entire Mars architecture.
"The Mars program is going to be even stronger," vowed NASA Administrator
Daniel Goldin on Tuesday during the opening session of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Space 2000 conference here.Ushering in new missions
The document will usher in new types of missions slated for launch in 2005 and beyond, while delaying others most notably a bid to return Martian samples to
Earth for study. 
"Don't look for conservative. I'd look for exciting, for aggressive, butmeasured in distances you can travel with new technologies."
"The fundamental questions we are asking are so complex its going to take decades to get an answer," said Daniel McCleese, the chief scientist in the Mars exploration directorate at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
The restructuring effort began as the dust settled from the back-to-back failures of the Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander probes in, respectively, September and December 1999.
Spooked by the losses, the agency quickly scrapped plans for another lander attempt in 2001 and reconfigured the lineup for its 2003 shot, opting to send twin rovers, but no orbiter.
(However, NASA has pressed on with plans to launch an orbiter in 2001. Officials have provisionally dubbed the probe the "2001 Mars Odyssey." Science fiction author
Sir Arthur C. Clarke whose 2001: A Space Odyssey inspired the name has already signed off on the moniker, said Jeffrey Plaut, the missions deputy project manager.)Multibillion-dollar question
What NASA will launch toward Mars in 2005, 07 and for every 26 months beyond that remains a multibillion-dollar question.
As part of a clean-slate approach to reassembling its plans to scientifically assault Mars, NASA solicited input from a broad range of scientists, some 40 aerospace companies and its own dozen centers scattered across the country.
"NASA cast a wide net for ideas," said JPL scientist Sylvia Miller, who offered a sampler of mission proposals during the conference with the caveat that there was no implication that any of the ideas would actually make the cut.
Indeed, NASAs stable of Mars probes seems as extravagant as always, if not more so.
Even within the relatively staid world of orbiters and landers, the proposed probes boast some superhuman attributes, including the ability to spy features as small as 12 inches (30 centimeters) across from orbit or drill hundreds of yards (meters) deep while on the surface.
"We want to get that deep and find out whats there," said Dave Lavery, NASA program executive for solar system exploration.
Exotic end of the spectrum
On the more exotic end of the spectrum, NASA is considering everything from inflatable rovers designed to rappel down sheer cliffs to orbiters that would scatter eight 220-pound (100-kilogram) "scout" microprobes to any latitude on the planet perhaps even over the course of a year.
"Some scouts could be saved and deployed following some future discovery," Miller said. Other mission concepts include every imaginable type of flying robot from airplanes to gliders to blimps to hot-air balloons.
"Aerial missions are coming," promised JPLs Viktor Kerzhanovich.
What may take longer is an attempt to robotically return samples of Martian soil and rock to
Earth."A Mars sample return has turned from almost tomorrow to figuring out how to do it," McCleese said.
Current thinking among those involved in the restructuring effort favors adding breadth to the overall Mars program, he said.
"Dont look for conservative," McCleese said of the revised plan, which should be made public late next month. "Id look for exciting, for aggressive, but measured in distances you can travel with new technologies."
But Goldin, the NASA administrator, warned that the agency would not be immune to setbacks.
"Were going to have more failures. Let me say it again, Were going to have more failures,"
Goldin said. "NASA is about revolutionary change, and with that come failures."
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