Mars Surveyor Program

The Mars Surveyor Program was the NASA program created in 1994 to send spacecraft to Mars at every launch opportunity, which comes about every 26 months, over the following decade. Its first spacecraft, Mars Global Surveyor, launched in 1996 and went into orbit around the planet. The 1998 missions, Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander, were grouped together as the Mars Surveyor 98 project. NASA's 1998 press kit says all of its Mars missions planned for the first decade of the next century also fell under this program. To save cost, NASA chose a single industrial partner, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, to build and operate the Mars Surveyor spacecraft over several years, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory created a Mars Surveyor Operations Project to manage mission operations across the multi-year program.