European scientists want to land on Mars. More than 100 researchers announced Friday that they plan a robot mission in 2011 to tackle the most dramatic question in space science: is there extraterrestrial life?
The flight, part of the European Space Agency's Aurora program, will be a testbed for an even more ambitious international robotic mission in 2016 to collect rock and soil samples from the Martian surface, and return them to laboratories on Earth.
The Mars sample return mission in its turn will be a technological rehearsal for the biggest adventure of all: an international attempt to establish a human foothold on Mars in 2030.
The 2011 proposal was the fruit of a two-day workshop in Birmingham, UK, attended by observers from the US space agency NASA and space scientists from Canada and 15 European countries.
"They said, `we want to focus on getting to the surface of Mars, and exploring in three dimensions: not just going across the surface but also beneath the surface.' They said, `we can do that in more than one way,'" said David Parker, of Britain's Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, the body that channels government money into space science.
"The final point is not just doing the first mission. We need to make the next step, and secure for Europe an exciting role in the first mission to bring samples back from Mars, and we want to do that, starting in 2016, and we are ready to do it in collaboration with NASA."
The Aurora scientists have yet to choose between three candidates for the 2011 flight, expected to cost at least 500 million euros. One of them will build on the technology of Beagle 2, the British mission led by Colin Pillinger of the UK's Open University, which reached Mars on Christmas Day 2003 but never reported home.
All of them will involve a touchdown on the red planet and all of them involve an implicit search for life.
By June, the Aurora scientists will have hammered out a formal proposal. By December, they hope to have persuaded European ministers to give the go-ahead.
If they do, then in 2011 a Russian Soyuz rocket will take off from a European launchpad at Kourou in French Guiana.
It will propel least one European rover and perhaps an orbiter on a long, slow journey to an as yet undecided destination in 2013 on the surface of a planet that continues to astonish scientists.
In 2003, before the arrival of the ill-fated Beagle 2, two NASA exploration rovers and a European satellite called Mars Express, scientists were confident that Mars had once been home to erupting volcanoes, seething rivers and turbulent seas. But they also believed that Mars had been parched and geologically lifeless for the last 3 billion years.
Last year, Mars Express identified tantalizing evidence of volcanic activity and flows of water in geologically recent times.
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