Nick,

THanks for the insight!

Thanks also for bringing up the use of craters as "drill holes" to get samples of the subsurface. I think a lot of people -- me included -- gravitate towards hills as things you'd want to go look at, but in practice looking at the suite of rocks dredged up by impacts is probably what the science team will do with this site. That was exactly the approach used by the Apollo missions.

One key question is, how far down are the water-borne sediments likely to be? If the nearby craters are a few hundred meters in diameter, then we're only sampling about that deeply. If we think there is a km or two of whatever on top of the lake deposits, then we probably wont get at them, except as more widely dispersed fragments from larger, more distant impacts.

How widespread do you think the preference was for Athabasca over Gusev for science? As in, if safety issues had been identical at the two sites, which do you think would have won on science alone?

One other site that ocurrs to me where an MER class mission could be useful is Amazonis. There is some debate about whether it is filled in with lava or mudflows (or both), right? And it looks pretty trafficable, though it probably violates something else on the long list of site constraints. I would think something like MER would have been able to answer some questions there.

Thanks!