WASHINGTON -- NASA has picked nearly a dozen concepts that deserve further study for exploring Mars, including a red planet platoon of gliders, small landers, and a way to snag Martian atmospheric dust and gas for return to Earth.

The concepts have been selected under NASA's Mars Scout program. Ten innovative ideas were culled from 43 proposals, with teams selected receiving $150,000 each to flesh out their idea further over the next 6 months.

NASA is eyeing 2007 for the first Scout liftoff.

The selected mission concepts, and the Principal Investigators for each of the winning ideas, are:

• SCIM (Sample Collection for Investigation of Mars): Laurie Leshin, Arizona State University, Tempe. This innovative mission would sample atmospheric dust and gas using aerogel and use a "free-return trajectory" to bring the samples back to Earth;
• KittyHawk: Wendy Calvin, University of Nevada-Reno. A mission involving three gliders would explore the composition and stratigraphy of the walls of Valles Marineris in ways not possible for orbiters and landers;
• Urey: Jeff Plescia, U.S. Geological Survey, Flagstaff, Arizona. A surface rover would allow the absolute ages of geological materials to be remotely determined for the first time on any planet;
• MACO (Mars Atmospheric Constellation Observatory): Robert Kursinski, University of Arizona, Tucson. A network of micro-satellites as a constellation around Mars would characterize the 3-D structure of the atmosphere, giving a new look at martian climatology;
• Artemis: David Paige, University of California, Los Angeles. Three small landers and micro-rovers on the martian surface, with two directed to the polar regions, would explore the surface and shallow subsurface for water, organic materials and climate;
• MEO (Mars Environmental Observer): M. Janssen, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California. This science orbiter would intensively explore the role of water, dust, ice and other materials within the martian atmosphere to understand parts of the hydrologic cycle;
• Pascal: Rob Haberle, NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. A network of 24 weather stations on the martian surface would provide more than two years of continuous monitoring of humidity, pressure and temperature and other measurements;
• Mars Scout Radar: Bruce Campbell, Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC. An orbiter mission would use Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging to map the surface geomorphology and very shallow subsurface (three to five meters deep), to detect buried water channels and other features
• The Naiades: Bob Grimm, Blackhawk GeoServices, Golden, Colorado. Four landers will explore for subsurface liquid water using a novel low-frequency sounding method; and
• CryoScout: Frank Carsey, JPL. This mission, designed to use heated water jets to descend through Martian polar ice caps, could potentially probe to depths of tens to hundreds of meters while measuring composition and searching for organic compounds.

Jim Garvin, lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Program here at NASA Headquarters, said the ideas proposed are indeed innovative.

"These ten mission concepts provide revolutionary new vantage points and tools for exploring the new Mars that has emerged from the observations of the Mars Global Surveyor," Garvin said.

The Scout ideas that were chosen are to help NASA shape a broad competition that would pepper Mars with small missions in the future.

Ed Weiler, head of NASA's space science program, said his selection of the winners was determined by their overall scientific merit and potential for implementation under a total mission cost cap of $300 million.