The spacecraft will travel 10 months from Earth to Mars to land near the southern polar cap in December 1999 and carry out a three- month mission to search for traces of subsurface water in this frozen, layered terrain. The lander carries three scientific packages: the Mars descent imager, furnished by Malin Space Science Systems, Inc., which will view the landing site at increasingly higher resolution; the atmospheric lidar experiment, provided by Russia's Space Research Institute, which will measure the presence and height of atmospheric hazes, along with a miniature microphone provided by The Planetary Society, to record the sounds of Mars; and the Mars Volatile and Climate Surveyor science package. The mission is part of NASA's Mars Surveyor program, a sustained program of robotic exploration of the red planet, managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Office of Space Science, Washington, DC. Lockheed Martin