 Mars, commonly referred to as the Red Planet, is one of our closest neighbors beyond the moon. It has qualities that make it a potentially habitable outpost. Before all Martian exploration ended in November 1982, a handful of probes had made the year-long journey. Viking 1's orbiter completed nearly 1,500 picture-taking trips around the planet. While its lander studied samples and returned views from the surface. As a result, Mars is well mapped, but many questions remain. So researchers are designing systems to explore the varied Martian geography in anticipation of a return mission. On calm sunny mornings, Jim Burke can often be found flying this lightweight solar balloon in the courtyard at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Mr. Burke views his study as an important stepping stone to a larger goal in gathering more precise information about the Red Planet. Now the Martian atmosphere is carbon dioxide. And if you put a black balloon that's light enough with a light enough payload into that atmosphere, the sun shining on the black balloon will warm it up like the heat inside a parked car with the windows shut. And it gets hot enough inside to become a hot air balloon. Scientists, students and engineers from JPL and the California Institute of Technology have taken the concept a step further by testing the feasibility of this 30-foot diameter solar balloon that might be used to study Mars. In theory, the device could be blown around by local Martian winds during the day to collect data and take pictures. At night it would cool down, lose buoyancy and lower itself to the ground to survey the planet's surface. The small, clear balloon holds the larger one off the ground at night so it won't get damaged. There are many regions of Mars that could be explored this way, according to Jim Burke. One very interesting possibility is to put the balloon in the atmosphere, get it inflated, operating up in the polar regions, and let the circumpolar winds drift it down across the polar cap over the layered terrain, which is in the canyons that spiral out from the polar cap, then across the immense dune fields that surround the polar caps and on downward into temperate latitudes on Mars. To remotely explore the surface of Mars, a number of devices have been investigated. They include early roving vehicle prototypes designed to crawl or wheel their way across alien terrain. Rovers continue to be designed today, based on some of these models. University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Labs graduate students and faculty have recently built this gigantic two-wheeled prototype, Mars Road. Another vehicle being developed is this robotic six-wheeled version, which is JPL's latest test bed for understanding the control and vision systems needed for a Mars mission. According to Brian Wilcox of the robotics and teleoperators research group at JPL, sending commands to a rover on Mars would be difficult because of the 10 to 40 minute round-trip delay. You can't just sit there and steer in your armchair from a TV monitor and make the vehicle do useful things because of this long speed of light delay. So we've identified several techniques to maneuver a vehicle on Mars in such a way that you can go useful distances in a day in spite of the fact that the humans are this long speed of light delay removed from the action. As for eyes, it is clear to be of climbing objects a third taller than its full effect. The proposed mission vehicle would have robotic arms to make measurements and collect rock and soil samples. Using rover's onboard vision system, scientists can freeze three-dimensional images from its pair of television cameras. They can then designate the pathway to follow, continually updating commands from Earth so that the rover is able to avoid obstacles and hazards. As more sophisticated visual systems are developed, greater artificial intelligence can help the rover find its own way if given high-resolution imagery of the Martian surface and a list of targeted regions designated by Earth-bound scientists. The hope is to someday send a manned mission to Mars but a more detailed study of the planet is necessary first and these pioneering steps can be made by roving vehicles and balloons. Again, Brian Wilcox. If you imagine an expedition Lewis and Clark trying to survey the Louisiana Purchase, they basically made one track across a very small fraction of the land surface of the Earth. It took them years to do it and yet they found incredible things all along the way. We could certainly have a dozen rover missions which yielded equally interesting results. The exploration of Mars, sending unmanned vehicles as pathfinders for the future.