Morning Marcia,

Superbowl? Was there a Superbowl this weekend? Tells you how much I follow football...

My suggestion about a petition was a little tongue-in-cheek. Petitions have worked to get a successful mission extended, or to get funding for one of NASA's missions. But I have my doubts that a petition would be enough to radically change the course of NASA's Mars program...kind of on the scale of doing a 180 in a supertanker. Basically we'd be saying that NASA's brilliant minds are wrong and us amateurs know better. What are the odds any institution would stand for that? Maybe if somebody like the Mars Society got fired up about it, did all sorts of design studies and proved it out, and started massive lobbying, maybe...but then, the MS is focused on manned missions to Mars, and might view better robotic missions as counter to its agenda. Politics, everywhere you look, it's politics.

...retrieve Martian soil/rocks and even atmosphere to bring back to Earth...

Seems to me like getting an atmosphere sample's easy, just crack the valve on a cylinder full of vacuum ("cylinder full of vacuum"--there's an oxymoron if ever I've heard one!) and phht, bottled Mars air. Now that you mention it, it would be so much simpler and cheaper that we could probably start getting air samples right away, years in advance of the complicated soil sample return missions. There'd be some value in it, I think; samples taken close to the surface might answer that long-standing controversy about the mysterious peroxides that are supposed to make life impossible.

--Robert