Launch: November 1996
Arrival: September 1997
Primary Mission: 687 days
Contact with NASA's Mars Observer was lost on August 21, 1993. Since that time, the Mars science community has been working toward establishing a new program to recover the lost science for a fraction of the original cost of Mars Observer. The new program which evolved between September 1993 and February 1994 came to be known as Mars Surveyor. As of this writing (Summer 1994), Mars Surveyor is still pending Congressional approval.
Mars Surveyor is an aggressive but tightly cost-constrained approach to exploring Mars over the decade from 1996 through 2006. A series of small orbiters and landers built by industry will be launched at each Mars launch opportunity (26 months apart) over the next decade. Total annual costs for this program are capped at $150 million (Mars Observer cost about $900 million between 1984 and 1993).
The first spacecraft in the Mars Surveyor series will be Mars Global Surveyor. It is expected to launch on November 3, 1996 aboard a Delta II rocket from Florida's Kennedy Space Center. In 1998, two launches are planned. One will carry a lander about half the size of Mars Pathfinder; the other will carry the remaining duplicates of Mars Observer's instruments plus a camera.
Additional orbiters and landers are planned to launch in 2001, 2003, and 2005. These missions will likely involve considerable international cooperation with scientists and engineers in Russia, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, and elsewhere.