This idea is a faster better cheaper way to go. I'm not saying we shouldn't send drills and rigs etc too. But what I want to see is if any underground water is blasted out to the surface and what happens to it once exposed to the Martian atmosphere. And who knows what else we might blast out from deep under the surface. ;-)

There was a proposal a few years back for the now-cancelled Europa Orbiter to have a kinetic energy device that could hit the surface of Europa and hopefully blast material into orbit so the space craft could fly through and collect some of the material and analyze it. Seemed like a good inexpensive innovative idea. Maybe that's why NASA dropped the idea even before dropping EO.