The United States and Russia met today to advance a plan to collaborate on unmanned missions to the Moon and to Mars. After working together for so long on projects like MIR and the ISS, it makes sense for the US and Russia to work together on other types of missions - since presumably Russia is looking for the same data that we are, why should one country foot the entire bill?
An orbiter is planned to be launched to the Moon in October of next year that will orbit the poles, looking for good places to land people or rovers in later trips. Among other things, the trip will be looking for possible water under the surface. The orbiter will be made by NASA, while a lot of the technology used to analyze the geography and chemistry of the surface was designed by Russia.
In 2009, NASA plans to send a rover to Mars that will also use the Russian technology. Like the moon mission, an important goal of the rover will be searching for water.
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