EUROPEAN space scientists meeting in London last week hatched a plan for the
European Space Agency to bring a 200-gram sample of Martian soil back to Earth
by around 2010. If the project goes ahead, ESA will get to take a close look for
evidence of microbial life on Mars before NASA does.
The proposed mission would be a successor to ESA’s Mars Express project,
which is due to blast off in 2003 carrying the British-built Beagle 2 lander.
“My nightmare scenario is that Beagle 2 gets a sniff of a positive result and we
have no plans in place…
