Mars Exploration Program (MEP) is a long-term effort to explore the planet Mars, funded and led by NASA. Formed in 1993, MEP has made use of orbital spacecraft, landers, and Mars rovers to explore the possibilities of life on Mars, as well as the planet's climate and natural resources. The program is managed by NASA's Science Mission Directorate. As a result of 40% cuts to NASA's budget for fiscal year 2013, the Mars Program Planning Group (MPPG) was formed to help reformulate the MEP, bringing together leaders of NASA's technology, science, human operations, and science missions.
Governance First convening in October 1999, the Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group (MEPAG) enables the scientific community to provide input for the planning and prioritizing of the Mars Exploration Program. Mars exploration missions, as do most NASA missions, can be fairly costly. For example, NASA's Curiosity rover (landed on Mars in Aug 2012) has a budget exceeding $2.5 billion. NASA also has goals of collaborating with the European Space Agency (ESA) in order to conduct a mission involving returning a sample of Mars soil to Earth, which would likely cost at least $5 billion and take ten years to complete.
Objectives
According to NASA, there are four broad goals of the MEP, all having to do with understanding the potential for life on Mars.
Determine if life ever arose on Mars – In order to understand Mars's habitability potential, it must be determined whether or not there ever was life on Mars, which begins with assessing the planet's suitability for life. The main strategy regarding the MEP, nicknamed "Follow the Water," is the general idea that where water is present, there is life (at least in instances on Earth). It is likely that if life ever did arise on Mars, there would need to be a supply of water that was present for a substantial amount of time. Therefore, a prominent goal of the MEP is to look for places where water is, was, or could possibly be, such as dried up riverbeds, under the planetary surface, and in Mars's polar ice caps. Aside from water, life also needs sources of energy to survive. The abundance of superoxides makes life on the surface of Mars very unlikely, which essentially rules out sunlight as a possible source of energy for life. Therefore, alternative sources of energy must be searched for, such as geothermal and chemical energy. These sources, which are both used by life forms on Earth, could be used by microscopic life forms living under the Mars's surface. Life on Mars can also be searched for by finding signatures of past and present life or biosignatures. Relative carbon abundance and the location and forms that it can be found in can inform where and how life may have developed. Also, the presence of carbonate minerals, along with the fact that Mars's atmosphere is made up largely of carbon dioxide, would tell scientists that water may have been on the planet long enough to foster the development of life. Characterize the climate of Mars – Another goal of the MEP is to characterize both the current and past climate of Mars, as well as factors that influence climate change on Mars. Currently what is known is that the climate is regulated by seasonal changes of Mars's ice caps, movement of dust by the atmosphere, and the exchange of water vapor between the surface and the atmosphere. To understand these climatic phenomena means helping scientists more effectively model Mars's past climate, which brings a higher degree of understanding of the dynamics of Mars. Characterize the geology of Mars – The geology of Mars is differentiable from that of Earth by, among other things, its extremely large volcanoes and lack of crust movement. A goal of the MEP is to understand these differences from Earth along with the way that wind, water, volcanoes, tectonics, cratering and other processes have shaped the surface of Mars. Rocks can help scientists describe the sequence of events in Mars's history, tell whether there was an abundance of water on the planet through identifying minerals that are formed only in water, and tell if Mars once had a magnetic field (which would point toward Mars at one point being a dynamic Earth-like planet). Prepare for the human exploration of Mars – A human mission to Mars presents a massive engineering challenge. With Mars's surface containing superoxides and lacking a magnetosphere and an ozone layer to protect from radiation from the Sun, scientists would have to thoroughly understand as much of Mars's dynamics as possible before any action can be taken toward the goal of putting humans on Mars.
Challenges
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