Just finished here on our local PBS station. It had some good highlights of the development challenges of the craft that were pretty interesting. The parachutes gave them particular trouble, which raised the quesiton of why JPL chose not to utilize the rather large resource of the Air Force?
Scientific American several years ago had a good review of Air Force reseach on high speed parachute systems that was pretty interesting at the time and certainly had some good application ideas for the MER missions.
On a personal note, we were at JPL September of 2002 and took the opportunity to see the two landers under construction. It was a fascinating tour. My kids are both very excited about this. The inspiration of these relatively limited robots on the kids of today should not be underestimated. In a few years we could see vastly more capable robots doing many things, in orbit as well as on Mars and even luna.
It seems pretty clear that NASA, Cornell and JPL are going to be able to build a very successful, informaiton rich mission. We owe the project leaders and workers a debt of gratitude for a job well done.
Ed