I'm very skeptical of that part about the lander rocking wildly back and forthe throughout most of its rocket-propelled descent -- the Vikings and the lunar Surveyors didn't do that. I suspect that part was stuck in for dramatic effect. (Either that, or it was based on the assumption that Phoenix would still have a landing obstacle avoidance system, which it does not anymore.)

The lander will only last a few months!?

I find this mission less appealing every time I hear about it.

This lander should have the ability to move around.

Perhaps the same way the MER landers were only supposed to last a couple of months (90 days)? We're about a year and a half now on both of them. I bet at least one of them hits 2 years.

Phoenix is likely made of similar stuff. I guess a lot of it depends on whether or not there are frequent "cleaning events" at that location.

It won't matter how much dust is on the solar arrays when the polar night comes...

Yes, the problem with this one (as with Polar Lander, had it succeeded) is the inevitable coming of the polar night. But as for its lifetime not being long enough: it will achieve 90% of its official science goals in 2 months, for Heaven's sake -- with the rest (weather data) being achieved during the next 3 months.

And to say that it's not scientifically worthwhile is nonsense. While the MERs explored Mars horizontally, this one will explore it vertically by being the first subsurface mission -- and also the very first examination of a Martian environment water-rich enough to be potentially habitable by current-day microbes. (Given its mass spectrometer's ability to detect methane and surface organics, it's also the first potentially biological Mars mission since Viking.) Despite all the official claims about the selection of the first Scout mission being "fully competitive", the word at the first Mars Strategic Roadmap meeting was that NASA HQ virtually demanded this mission precisely because it fits in so well with the central thread of Mars exploration -- and does so at minimum price by using an already-built spacecraft. To quote Bette Davis, don't ask for the Moon when you have the stars.

I really wish it were possible to put minimal crawler treads on instead of footpads to give the vehicle some tens of meters mobility, but it ain't!

This mission, though heading for sub-polar dirty-ice and/or icy-dirt deposits instead of the polar layered dust and ice deposits will achieve many of the same critical science objectives lost with Polar Lander. An essential in climate modelling is information on the adsorbed CO2 and H20 capacity of generic Mars Dust. That info is crucial in modelling atmosphere / climate behavior during precessional climate cycles and we have nothing approaching real numbers, just wild-ass-guesses.

But Phoenix has a real microscope and even an atomic force microscope! That's so cool, the resolution of images that we have from Mars will be magnitudes better again.

Also looking at the MOC images of the Phoenix landing sites, it doesn't really need any mobility. The scenery looks like a frozen wasteland everywhere with no details at all.

There is a much greater need for ground truth data at high latitudes than having another rover right now. IMO Phoenix would be justified solely as a platform to land the MET package and get lots of real data from this far north to test the atmospheric models.

Sure in an ideal world it would have an RTG and be a rover and ... but the only reason it's flying at all is because it can be flown on a shoestring without cutting the sort of corners Beagle did.

Actually, there is one real reason to wish it had limited mobility -- Steve Squyres worries that the distribution of near-surface ice in the landing areas may be much patchier than we can tell from our current low-resolution maps. But I would imagine that the data from the Mars Express and MRO radar sounders -- even if they don't punch very far into the surface of Mars -- will at least provide us with a far higher-resolution map of that ice distribution.

To be fair, I think this was good manipulation. Using already designed instruments on an already built lander allows a mission to fly for less than it would have cost (yes, if you calculate the true total cost you would count original develoment, but it isn't like the already spent money can be reallocated) that will provide valuble science. The competing Urey proposal, while interesting, had, from what I have read, a high probablility of an even more severe busting of the cost cap.

Deception: I have to strongly disagree. This will be an essential science mission. The people on this board, myself included, have a strong bias towards image data because we like to work with it - and in that sense, a rover would be much more appealing. But in terms of science, I am really glad this mission is going to fly (and, as has been said so well by others, it will, in addition to trench imagery and a pan of some semi-polar terrain for the first time, the highest resolution imagery of the martian surface to date, thanks to its microscopes.

Of course, there is the slim-but-unlikely chance it will wake up afterwards. Very unlikely though, but worth a contact attempt or two.

Another issue I have is the depth that the lander can dig at. 15cm is not that deep.

4 to 8 feet deep would have been a better depth for finding ice.

Actually, it will dig about .5 meters (1.6 feet). It will sample every 15 centimeters.

Yep -- and I can tell you they're virtually certain it will find ice, given that digging depth.

Is there any chance Phoenix will be able to 'hop,' as Surveyor 6 did?