AFTER a four year hiatus, the exploration of Mars, first launched by the Soviet Union in 1962, is poised to resume this year with three missions, two US and one French Russian.
The French Russian mission will be launched in mid November. Named Mars 96, it will use an orbiter to launch two small scientific stations that will land on the surface and two penetrating units that will analyse the shallow sub soil.
A month later, the US Mars Pathfinder will take off with the mission of landing a scientific station and a small robot to explore the area in its immediate vicinity. Finally, Mars Global Surveyor-1 will orbit Mars via its poles.
All three missions are expected to reach Mark in mid 1997 after the usual 11 month journey.
The planet's hold on the humane imagination dates back at least to the ancient Greeks, who named it after the god of war because of its red hue.
It was the discovery through telescopes last century of what appeared to be canals that led some astronomers to conclude that there must have once existed on Mars a civilisation capable of building a huge irrigation network. The "canals" were eventually proved to be of natural origin, indicating that water was plentiful on Mars three million years ago - just when life was appearing on Earth.
Probes carried by the two most successful of all Mars missions - Viking 1 and 2, launched by NASA in 1975 - found no trace of life on the surface of the planet. None of the next three missions are geared to dig far below the frozen surface for traces of fossilised life.
The last attempt to explore Mars was the most ambitious, and its failure therefore the most disappointing. Mars Observer was launched in 1992 by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and was designed to vastly increase knowledge of our sister planet.
But for unexplained reasons, the vehicle stopped transmitting data three days before going into Martian orbit.
Located about 35 million miles from Earth, Mars is the fourth largest planet in the Solar System. It gravitates around the sun at a distance of 140 million miles - as against 95 million miles for Earth - and takes 688 days to go around the sun.
It turns on itself in 24 hours and 40 minutes, much like Earth.
It's half the size of Earth but is much lighter: its mass is a tenth of Earth's. The Martian surface is more rugged than Earth's, with differences exceeding 19 miles.