NASA intends to cancel plans to join Europe on a Mars sampling mission that is considered important to learning if life appeared beyond Earth as the U.S. space agency balances out a virtually flat $17.7 billion budget for 2013, officials said on Monday.
NASA's proposal leaves Europe without a key partner for a proposed two-spacecraft mission to collect and return soil samples from Mars. The so-called Exobiology on Mars, or ExoMars, probes are targeted to launch in 2016 and 2018.
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