1.   After spending several hundred thousand dollars, he said, the site had landed only one advertiser, the Saturn division of General Motors.

2.   However, those rules also allow flight controllers leeway to keep the shuttle aloft if there is unfavorable weather at either the East or West coast landing sites.

3.   If the weather turns foul in Florida and California again Wednesday, mission managers will consider staffing a third landing site at White Sands, N.M., on Thursday.

4.   It will be associated with the Ares Vallis landing site.

5.   NASA prefers the Florida landing site, because shuttles that land in California must be flown to Kennedy on the back of a jet.

6.   Such a fleet could swiftly deploy a battalion of peacekeepers to a foreign crisis spot and provide takeoff and landing sites for helicopters, he said.

7.   That information will help NASA pick future landing sites and determine how much shielding will be needed to send astronauts to the planet.

8.   The Global Surveyor also will photograph both Viking landing sites today.

9.   The property had long been used as a storage yard for the Department of Water and Power and as a helicopter landing site for area police departments.

10.   Those areas could become landing sites for a robotic mission to gather rocks and return them to Earth for analysis, or for later human expeditions.