French involvement may boost Mars studies.

The trouble with designing a planetary mission several years in advance is that the spacecraft may not have the capability to follow up on brand-new discoveries. For instance, NASA has no plans--or money--to drill into Mars' northern lowlands, which recent evidence suggests may have been sculpted by an ancient ocean.

A proposed collaboration between the French space agency and NASA could change that.

In a plan now under negotiation, the French would spend some $400 million on Mars exploration, nearly doubling the U.S. budget for obtaining samples over the next decade and providing a number of new, small missions for studying the Red Planet.

The French space agency would fund several launches of the recently developed Ariane-5 rocket and supply most of the parts for a Mars orbiter, already scheduled to carry Martian soil and rock cores back to Earth in 2008. In return, NASA would give French scientists some of the samples.

Jacques Blamont, chief adviser at the National Center of Space Studies (CNES), the French space agency in Paris, says that talks with NASA began last October and that details of a collaboration were fleshed out during a meeting in Paris in early March. The plan is now under review at NASA and at CNES, and an agreement is expected by the end of the year.

"The idea is to augment the science of the Mars program," says Blamont. "It would open up the possibility of doing something other than just sample-return [missions]."

Indeed, NASA's focus on Mars in the next decade is to bring a pound or so of the planet back to Earth. Rovers stowed on spacecraft scheduled for launch in 2001 and 2003 are to gather and store samples, and a mission set for 2005 is expected to retrieve one of the two caches. A $500 million budget cap has imposed this single-minded approach to Mars studies, notes Daniel J. McCleese, chief scientist of Mars exploration programs at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

"The additional opportunities [with the French] will revolutionize the strategy," says McCleese. "We have much more flexibility to take advantage of the [information from] missions leading up to the sample return if we have additional launch capability and partners who have their own science capability that supports ours or is outside our reach."

The Ariane-5 class of rockets has not yet proven its reliability. One of them, along with its $800 million science payload, spun out of control in 1996 (SN: 7/27/96, p. 59). However, the rocket design should have enough time to prove its mettle by 2001, notes Blamont.

If NASA gets a free ride on Ariane-5 launches, the money saved could bolster the capabilities of Mars-bound craft now under development. For instance, notes McCleese, the vehicle scheduled to retrieve material collected by the 2001 and 2003 rovers might be equipped with tools to gather its own samples.

The NASA-CNES proposal also calls for new missions that would piggyback on Ariane-5 rockets already scheduled for commercial flights between 2001 and 2005. These micromissions might include a device that could drill as deep as 10 meters into the Martian surface. "These are way-out technologies, but that's what we're looking at for this series of missions," says McCleese. As a result of the missions, "new samples might be returned from sites that are just being discovered," he adds.

In a separate proposal, the Italian space agency and NASA are considering a collaboration on a radar experiment that would fly on Mars Express, a European Space Agency mission scheduled for launch in 2003. The experiment would search for water beneath the surface of Mars.