The Mars Scout Program is a new line of small robotic Mars missions which will be selected from proposals from the science community, and might involve airborne vehicles (e.g., airplanes or balloons) or small landers, as an investigation platform. New vistas could be opened up by this approach either through the airborne scale of observation or by increasing the number of sites visited.

The first Scout mission to be selected is a lander called Phoenix, proposed by the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, which will search for signs of water near one of the poles of the Red Planet.