... The mission will consist of a stationary lander and a surface rover. The mission has the primary objective of demonstrating the feasibility of low-cost landings on and exploration of the Martian surface. ... The spacecraft will be launched in December 1996 for an arrival on Mars in July 1997. The scientific objectives include atmospheric entry science, long-range and close-up surface imaging, with the general objective being to characterize the Martian environment for further exploration. ...

MARS-96 . ROBOTIC SPACECRAFT MISSION TO MARS. ... Scientific goals . ... Orbiter . ... the experiments . ... SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVES OF THE ORBITER EXPERIMENTS . The experiments on board the orbiter should study the atmosphere and surface of Mars with remote sensing methods. ... Measurements of the elemental composition with a gamma-spectrometer (PHOTON experiment) and of the mineralogical composition with IR-spectrometers (OMEGA and PFS) make it possible to get data about the nature of rocks. ...

... no comet has been observed with an orbit that indicates that it came from interstellar space, . ... From this he proposed that comets reside in a vast cloud at the outer reaches of the solar system. ... Unfortunately, since the individual comets are so small and at such large distances, we have no direct evidence about the Oort Cloud. ... T he Kuiper Belt is a disk-shaped region past the orbit of Neptune roughly 30 to 100 AU from the Sun containing many small icy bodies. ... Small Bodies .. ...

Cosmic Research, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2004, pp. 435­488. Translated from Kosmicheskie Issledovaniya, Vol. 42, No. 5, 2004, pp. 453­508. Original Russian Text Copyright © 2004 by Veselovsky, Panasyuk, Avdyushin, Bazilevskaya, Belov, Bogachev, Bogod, Bogomolov, Bothmer, Boyarchuk, Vashenyuk, Vlasov, Gnezdilov, Gorgutsa, Grechnev, Denisov, Dmitriev, Dryer, Yermolaev, Eroshenko, Zherebtsov, Zhitnik, Zhukov, Zastenker, Zelenyi, Zeldovich, Ivanov-Kholodnyi, Ignat'ev, Ishkov, Kolomiytsev, Krasheninnikov, Kudela,