How do the MER missions differ from past landings on Mars?
The beauty of both of our landing sites, the hematite site at Meridiani Planum and the Gusev site is that we have scientific hypotheses. We have a prediction, if you will, of what we are going to find. We are predicting at Meridiani Planum that it was formed by water. Once we land, once you can look at a rock, you can find out does it have layers in it? Is the hematite cemented between the grains or is it a coating that covers the rock? We basically have several hypotheses that water could have formed hematite in a variety of ways. I think, once we have that first rock, we may very well have the answer: It was this way as opposed to these others. So, there’s nothing like being on the ground looking at the landscape and basically looking at a rock and saying, where is the hematite? The same at Gusev: people have hypotheses that it’s a lakebed, that water flowed in. Within minutes of turning on the instruments after landing, we should be able to look around and see. Will we see rocks wit
