AS THE first human sets foot on Mars, the historic image will be beamed live to Earth thanks to the ingenuity of a Sydney scientist.

CSIRO scientist John Bunton will be honoured by US space agency NASA later this month for his work on the "beamformer".

He developed the antenna receiver system that will combine signals received at hundreds of antennas from the Mars lander and quickly convert them to video.

It will take three massive arrays of up to 400 12-metre antennas positioned around the world to follow the signals from a manned Mars mission.

"When the first pictures of man landing on the moon came through in 1969 the signals from the moon for the TV broadcast came through the Parkes antenna," Dr Bunton said.

"Australia has been intimately involved in space exploration and we will have a role when man eventually lands on Mars."

In 2004, President George Bush announced an ambitious plan for the US to return to the moon by 2020 and use it as a stepping stone for manned missions to Mars and beyond. But NASA said the earliest possible manned flight to Mars was at least 20 to 30 years away.