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Mars Site May Hold 'Buried Life'
sridharo sends in a report from the BBC that researchers have identified ancient rocks from Nili Fossae that could contain fossilized remains of life. These rocks are very similar to Pilbara rocks in northwest Australia. The rocks are estimated to be up to four billion years old, which means they have been around for three-quarters of the history of Mars. "[Many] scientists had hoped that they would soon have the opportunity to get much closer to these rocks. Nili Fossae was put forward as a potential landing site for NASA's ambitious new rover, the Mars Science Laboratory, which will be launched in 2011. ... But Nilae Fossae was eventually deemed too dangerous a landing site and it was finally removed from the list in June of this year." The research, led by a scientist from the SETI Institute, was published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.
I'm sure I'd like to see this happen just as much as you, but there's a couple problems. For one, NASA does have a limited budget. It may not be expensive for our country to build twenty of these, but it is expensive for NASA. We (as a nation) just don't value space exploration enough, which is sad.
The other problem is putting your eggs in the same basket. With each new rover we send, we can draw from lessons learned from past rover missions and improve them. What if all twenty had a fatal flaw that we didn't discover until it was too late? What if there was some instruments/capabilities that would be beneficial to have on them, but didn't know they would come in handy until after they landed? I would love to see a more aggressive space program. Although, it seems better for us to launch one rover every year for five years (each of which presumably more capable than the last), than to launch five all at once every five years.