I'm not arguing that a mission to the ice fields of mars should have been sent. But the Mars Polar Lander crashed, and now the 2nd version (in order to save money reused design), is showing signs of being poorly designed for its tasks. (and once again flawed with a short circuit in the ovens).

It seems like it would have been relatively simple task to drill an ice core down a couple of meters and simply slide the core into the body of the craft for slices and segments to be sampled from all strata. By this time we should have been able to have several ice cores drilled and sampled. All this scraping, taking pictures, scraping, shaking, and then aborting seems absurd even on "cheap" craft that only cost a few hundred million. The need to depend on pictures constantly with the attendant minimum of 1 sol turnaround time indicates the design was not robust enough. Sampling should have been failsafe and automatic and not need pictures and manual control from earth.

What is it now 63 sols and counting and they have yet to get an ice sample into the oven. The nominal mission is already 2/3 over. I can't help being blunt that this is very poorly designed sampling procedure.

I hope they can overcome these problems and get a reasonable number of samples while the craft lives. And at some point they may need to get less conservative as time is potentially running out.