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Abstract: Planetary exploration requires effective collaborations between planetary explorers in charge of acquiring data in the field and scientists in charge of monitoring exploration activities in habitats, mission control centers, and science centers. To provide such collaborations, NASA needs a new highly flexible, extensible, and robust mobile agent architecture, which allows NASA planetary explorers and scientists working in different locations, using a variety of exploration tools and computing systems to create automatically a unique data record of planetary exploration activities. Such systems should work in a highly dynamic distributed computing environment where the system requirements and the set of exploration tools change; highly specialized computing nodes appear and disappear from computing clusters; and transient wireless communication links undergo rapid changes. In this paper, we present a new component-based approach to developing mobile agent architecture for human planetary exploration. The result is a multi-tier architecture that offers a set of distinct features--beyond the Jini architecture--to address the software flexibility, extensibility, and robustness issues. The Jini system employs mobile objects, but it does not meet all the requirements of mobile agent systems. The new architecture addresses this shortcoming.