There's some hallway gossip that Phoenix maybe in trouble because it has blown out its budget. The rumor is that Lockheed-Martin may have sucked the government tit dry before completing the project. I'm not really surprised. They sold Phoenix as a cheap project because they had an existing vehicle from Mars 2001. However Mars 2001 was full of bugs because it was a clone of MPL. This is clear if you go to the Phoenix website http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/ where you can see them fretting over water hammer issues. IMHO it would have been cheaper to have dumped Mars 2001 in a museum and built a new vehicle from scratch.

Gary