The announcement follows the loss of two NASA spacecraft on unmanned missions.

Young, who retired as executive vice president of Lockheed Martin in 1995, will head a Mars Program Independent Assessment charged with "evaluating several recent successful and unsuccessful NASA missions to deep space, including Mars Pathfinder, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Climate Orbiter, Mars Polar Lander, Deep Space 1 and Deep Space 2," NASA said.

The team "will analyze the budgets, content, schedule, management structure and scientific organization of these missions."

The team will also review proposed revisions to NASA's existing Mars exploration program architecture "as options are developed by a group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California," it said.

Prior to his work at Lockheed Martin, Young worked as mission director of NASA's Viking project, which in 1976 achieved two successful unmanned landings on Mars.

Announcing Young's appointment Friday, NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin said, "I have asked Tom Young as the leader of this team to dig as deep as he can, ask as many questions as possible, and to operate in a completely independent environment."

The review of the programme will present its findings in March.

After the Mars Climate Orbiter probe was lost on September 23, NASA attributed the mission's failure to the fact that one team working on the project had been using metric measurements, while another team had used British imperial measurements.

And on December 6, NASA admitted that it had virtually given up hope of restoring communications with the Mars Polar Lander, which had last been heard from as it entered the Mars atmosphere the previous week.

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