The design of the European Space Agency's Mars Express was given approval last week after it was scrutinised at a meeting of the project's top scientists and engineers, ESA spokesman Franco Bonacina said.

Mars Express, a venture costing 150 million euros (dollars), is due to be launched in June 2003.

It comprises a spacecraft that will film and map the surface of Mars and use radar to probe for water beneath its surface. The orbiter will also send down a lander, called Beagle 2, after Charles Darwin's ship, which will analyse soil for any organic matter.

The project is in line with the so-called "faster, cheaper, better" doctrine, which holds that interplanetary probes can be built and launched quicker and cheaper than in the past, when such schemes were notoriously slow and gobbled up funds.

But the approach has run into criticism from some quarters after the United States lost two cut-price Mars probes within 10 weeks of each other last year.

The 125-million-dollar Mars Climate Orbiter was lost on September 23, apparently because of a sloppy mixup among programming teams working respectively in imperial and metric units.

The failure of 165-million-dollar Mars Polar Lander on December 3 is still unclear. There is suspicion that it crashed or landed in a deep ravine and was unable to send radio signals.

Bonacina said NASA had yet to complete a review of the failures, so it was impossible to incorporate any conclusions in the Mars Express design.

"Some patches can still be done in the software (if any modifications) have to do with programming or mission planning," he said.

Project manager Rudi Schmidt said, "The meeting went smoothly and the outcome is that Mars Express now moves full steam" into the construction phase.

NASA initiated its "smaller, faster, cheaper" approach after the loss of an 800-million-dollar probe, Mars Observer, in 1993.

The agency last month named a team to assess its Mars exploration programme after the new setbacks.

Copyright 1999 AFP. All rights reserved. The material on this page is provided by AFP and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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