Thanks, Splinx! I haven't been able to do near as much amateur work like that lately, and I miss it.

I wish we could bombard Mars with probes and encircle the Red Planet with all manner of imaging and instrumentation. If we really made the effort, we could answer the question of life on Mars within a decade, imo, without sending men there.

I hear ya. The elegant-but-expensive missions like Pathfinder and MPL are cool, but I wish we'd switch to a strategy of mass-producing cheap little probes to inundate Mars and get widespread data. As it stands, we have data from all of three points on the surface, all chosen for being safe and thus basically uninteresting. Imagine dropping hundreds of little "beach balls" like Pathfinder all over Mars, cheap enough that the risk of failure of some is acceptable, but with enough surviving to give us real coverage in some really interesting places. Um-um-um, scrumptious!

--Robert