Pact Furthers U.S.-Soviet Plans to Explore Mars

U.S. and Soviet officials on Friday signed an agreement they said could lead to the two nations placing experiments aboard each other’s spacecraft and a joint mission to Mars.

Samuel Keller, deputy associate administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Office of Space Science and Applications, said the agreement sets up “a strong possibility” the Soviets will set up experiments on U.S. spacecraft and vice versa.

The two nations agreed to exchange scientific data from unmanned missions to Mars and Venus, in a follow-up to the treaty signed by Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze in Moscow last April.

That pact renewed U.S.-Soviet cooperation in space after five years of frosty diplomatic relations.

First Step

The latest agreement sets the stage for U.S. participation in the July, 1988, launching of the Soviet probe Phobos to the Martian moon of the same name as a first step toward a manned flight to Mars.

The United States will have five scientists involved in the Phobos shot, but a proposal to double that number is under consideration, said Valery L. Barsukov, director of the Soviet Analytical Chemistry Institute of the Academy of Sciences, which is in charge of the data exchange.

The Soviets want to assign 10 of their scientists to the scheduled 1992 mission to Mars of NASA’s Observer probe.