NASA is expanding its plans for Mars, looking at not only a big, high-budget, long-term project to bring back a sample from Mars but also smaller, lower-cost missions to enable exploration of the red planet.

NASA has selected nine companies to develop concepts that could aid agency science missions to Mars down the road.The agency is awarding each company between $200,000 and $300,000 for this early-stage work,

Mars exploration has been always been the exclusive purview of national space agencies, but NASA is trying to change that, awarding a dozen research tasks to private companies as a prelude to commercial support for future missions to the Red Planet.

NASA has selected nine U.S. companies to conduct preliminary concept studies aimed at exploring how commercial services can contribute to future missions to Mars. Each of these companies will receive funding ranging from $200,

Officials with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will pay nine companies between $200,000 and $300,000 each to conduct a dozen tests to support future missions to Mars.

Nine companies have been selected to conduct early-stage studies of concepts for commercial services to support lower-cost, higher-frequency missions to the Red Planet.