Canberra will be the first place on Earth to receive images from the surface of Mars when NASA lands its most ambitious project to date on the red planet in 2004.
The Tidbinbilla southern hemisphere Deep Space Network Station will play a key role in tracking and communicating with the space craft and the robotic rovers during launch and once they land on the planet's surface.
The NASA team leading the Mars Exploration Rover Project arrived in Canberra yesterday to meet colleagues at Tidbinbilla and work on coordinating the launch and landing.

"It's really exciting for us and just as exciting for them," project manager Peter Theisinger said.

British-born visionary Arthur C. Clarke's writings inspired satellite communications and influenced President John F. Kennedy's May 25, 1961, decision to send American explorers to the moon. But his 1968 cinematic collaboration with the late Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, over-optimistically predicted an aggressive human expansion into space.

Recently, the 84-year-old writer spoke by satellite from his home in Sri Lanka to an audience at Rice University, where policy-makers, astronauts and academics gathered to mark the 40th anniversary of Kennedy's Sept. 12, 1962, speech at Rice on the importance of NASA's Apollo lunar expeditions.