NASA Will Discuss Use of Robots for 1998 Mars Exploration Mission

Top officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will meet with key space advisers this week to discuss plans for an ambitious exploration of Mars at the end of the century by robots and, later, by astronauts.

A robot mission would employ a rover vehicle to collect samples from the Martian surface and a vehicle to return the materials to Earth. The space agency is considering 1998 for the start of such a mission.

Among those who will be at the meeting with James C. Fletcher, NASA administrator, will be Neil A. Armstrong, a member of the National Commission on Space that set the exploration, prospecting and settling of Mars as a goal for the 21st Century.

Such exploration “is emerging as the key for rejuvenating the U.S. space program with an effort that would advance technologies, provide more direction to the space station and reassert U.S. space leadership,” the industry magazine Aviation Week and Space Technology said in its current edition.

It said an office is being established at the Johnson Space Center in Houston to help ready U.S. capability for the unmanned effort and to position NASA to manage a future U.S. manned mission to Mars.

The space agency last week said it would not request funding in the next fiscal year for the Mars Observer spacecraft, which had been scheduled to be launched toward Mars in 1990 to conduct scientific observations. That action means that such a mission cannot be launched until 1992.