On August 30 , 1983 he rode into Earth orbit on the shuttle orbiter Challenger; he subsequently flew on three additional shuttle missions between 1985 and 1992.
The latter chose North American Rockwell (later Rockwell International) as prime contractor for the shuttle orbiter, while the craft's orbital maneuvering engine system and heat-resistant ceramic tiles were furnished by McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed, respectively.
But it is also possible that it will not miss Mars at all.Calculated today, the odds of the comet hitting the planet are about 700 to one, says Paul Chodas of JPL, the laboratory in California that runs Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
ExoMars a European combination of orbiter, lander and rover will arrive on two flights, one in 2016 and one in 2018.
Indeed, the Earth orbiter had originally been intended as the first SSETI mission, but the complex design of some of its subsystems made the work take longer than expected.
Since ice is more transparent to radar than water is, the orbiter will be able to bounce radar waves off the top of the ocean, and thus work out how thick the ice is.
Ever since, scientists have been poring over images taken from other orbiting probes, trying to find out what happened to their robot.On January 16th Britain's space agency announced that its remains had been discovered in images from the High-resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE a fancy camera aboard the American craft Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
But the methane on Mars may have a non-biological origin, such as a volcano.What Dr Formisano did to fuel the debate was to announce that the instrument he is in charge of on ESA's Mars Express orbiter has detected a lot of formaldehyde.
Wayne Hale, formerly the space-shuttle programme manager at NASA, took a blunter view on his blog: "Houston didn't get an orbiter because Houston didn't deserve it," he wrote, explaining that people had become too complacent.George Abbey, a former director of the Johnson Space Centre and now a space-policy expert at Houston's Rice University, has similar worries.
Scientists would like to know if Phobos is a captured asteroid or formed in orbit, and whether it had, or has, water.China's first planetary probe, the tiny Yinghuo 1 orbiter, will also hitch a ride to Mars with Phobos-Grunt.
NASA's Dr Greene says plans have not yet been finalised for an additional Mars orbiter to go up in 2022 or later, which may include a camera similar to the one on the MRO.The other bright spot is Earth.
