Two years from now, Mars will be receiving Christmas gifts from the Earth – a whole fleet of spacecraft. The crafts are gifts from different nations, and will share communications channels to solve a problem which will intensify as Mars exploration gets on track: how to relay the data back to Earth gathered by many different missions. The first will arrive just before Christmas of 2003: the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and its lander, Beagle 2. The New Year will bring with it the Japanese ISAS’s Nozomi and NASA’s two Rovers. These will join NASA’s Mars Odyssey, which arrived on Mars last October and will still be operating.