国家航空航天局的两位宇航员将成为首次搭乘外国的航天飞船在外国着陆的美国宇航员。另外，美国国家航空航天局官员们正为两辆火星车的为期七个月的火星之旅做最后准备,据CNN记者约翰.泽瑞拉报道，要到火星绝非易事。

注释：
1.proposition n. 主张, 建议, 陈述，事情，命题
2.pushover n. <俚>容易打败的对手, 容易做的事情
3.slam dunk n. 灌篮
4.martian n. 火星人adj.火星的
5.mitigate v. 减轻
6.deploy v. 展开, 配置
7.geologist n. 地质学者
8.ingredient n. 成分, 因素

A Mission to Mars

And the two NASA astronauts would be the first to land in a foreign space craft and in a foreign country. NASA officials are also making final preparations to send twin rovers on a 7-month journey to Mars but as John Zarrella reports, getting there isn’t an easy proposition1.

JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN CORRESPONDENT
Mars is no pushover2. This is actually not a slam dunk3 and nobody should think that it is. Thirty-four times humans have sent spacecraft to our planetary neighbor. Only 11 times have the vehicles not crashed or burnt up in the Martian4 atmosphere, or missed their mark entirely and skipped out into deep space.

DAVE LAVERY, SOLAR SYSTEM EXPLORATION MGR
Mars may come and bite us and that’s one of the reasons that we’re flying two, just in case Mars bites us, and we lose one, we have a second basically to mitigate5 that risk and that potential.

JOHN
At the Kennedy Space Center, twin rovers are going through the final check-out. In June, two Delta rockets launched 3 weeks apart will start the rovers on a 7-month journey to Mars. After air-breaking through the atmospheres giant air bags will deploy6 surrounding the spacecraft, which, like an over-inflated soccer ball, will land and bounce on the Martian surface. In 1997, the Pathfinder Mission used air bags to successfully land on Mars. Two years later, the Polar Lander was lost during landing. That mission did not use air bags. So NASA engineers went back to a method they knew would work. At landing sites thousands of miles apart, these roving geologists7 will spend 90 days sampling Mars.

PETER THEISINGER, MARS EXPLORATION PROJECT MGR
They will wake up in the morning and they’ll get a message from Earth which says, this is what we want you to do today, and they’ll start doing that and then, kind of in the middle of the day, they’ll send back information on what they’ve accomplished, which we need to plan tomorrow.

JOHN
The rovers are not going to Mars looking for life but they will be looking for water, which is an essential ingredient8 for even the simplest forms of life to have existed or perhaps to still exist. John Zarrella CNN, Cape Canaveral, Florida

火星新探索

主播
国家航空航天局的两位宇航员将成为首次搭乘外国的航天飞船在外国着陆的美国宇航员。另外，美国国家航空航天局官员们正为两辆火星车的为期七个月的火星之旅做最后准备,据CNN记者约翰.泽瑞拉报道，要到火星绝非易事。

约翰•泽瑞拉， CNN 记者
登陆火星可不是闲差事。 这确实不是在灌篮，也不该有人这样认为。人类曾三十四次派遣宇宙飞船到我们的行星邻居火星。 可是仅有十一次能有幸不出问题，其余的情况下，运载工具要么是被撞碎或被火星大气烧尽,要么它们全然偏离目的地而误入外层空间。

戴维•拉维芮，太阳系探险主任
火星可能会“咬”我们，这是为什么我们用两台火星车的原因之一。万一火星咬上我们，我们就将损失一台火星车，但我们还有第二台，这样可以降低风险与损失。

约翰
在美国肯尼迪空间中心，两辆火星车正在接受最后检查。六月,两架三角州火箭将时隔三个星期先后发射，启动火星车的七个月的火星之旅。在穿透过大气层之后，巨大的气囊围绕着宇宙飞船展开，使它像一个充了太多气的足球蹦蹦跳跳地在火星表面着陆。一九九七年，探路者号就用空气袋成功地着陆火星。两年之后，极地登陆者号却在着陆时迷失了。那次任务没有使用空气袋。所以国家航空航天局工程师们重新采用这个他们知道行得通的方法。在彼此相距数千英里的地段，这二位游动的“地质学家”将花九十天时间对火星进行浏览。

彼特•塞辛格, 火星探险成员
他们每天晨起之后，将从地球得到讯息，告知他们今天需要做的事，然后他们就开始做，差不多正午时分他们就会发回讯息，通报完成的情况，我们就可以据此安排第二天的任务。

约翰
火星器到火星上不是去寻找生物，而是去寻找水，因为水是生命的基本要素，哪怕是曾经或至今仍然存的最简单的生物形式。CNN记者约翰•泽瑞拉，佛罗里达，卡纳维尔角报道