re: NASA saying MER is looking for life a lie
Chris,
It was on CNN News (TV version) yesterday. Miles O'Brien kept saying the mER rovers are going to search for life. It was a 10 minute report on the MER mission. Obviously O'Brien got his info from Matt Golombeck because Golombeck says - "were are going to be looking for evidence of life". Since the MER rovers do not carry life detection experiments, this is hogwash. The real life sciences mission to Mars is Beagle 2. NASA is just going prospecting again - like they did with Mars Pathfinder.
Plenty of opportunities existed to put a chiral detector on MER but it seems NASA's policy is to say its looking for life but never does. Makes good PR to lie to the public I guess.
Same-O same-O