The timetable for Mars exploration in the coming decade has slipped badly in recent months. First came news that NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), scheduled to launch in 2009, had been rescheduled for 2011. This was followed by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) announcement that its ExoMars lander, which has already slipped from 2013 to 2016, is now scheduled for 2018. And now we just learned that this year’s planned launch of Russia’s Phobos-Grunt mission, built to collect soil samples on the martian moon Phobos and return them to Earth, has been pushed back to 2011.
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