[X] My Assistant

[dvandorn]

From what I've been able to piece together, the final two candidate landing sites for the Mars Surveyor 2001 lander (which, of course, was canceled after MPL failed) were the Isidis Rim and what was then being called "the Hematite site" in Sinus Meridiani -- in other words, the site eventually selected for MER-B.

Can you imagine what would have happened had they sent an immobile lander to Meridiani and it landed out in the middle of the flat, featureless plains? With no outcrop in direct line of site?

We would have identified the blueberries as the source of the hematite seen from orbit, but would have had little to no clue as to how the blueberries had formed -- we would never even have seen the evaporite with the concretions eroding out of it. We would have no clue whatsoever that the dark mantling was the debris left over from the erosion of the soft, salty evaporite rocks, which would have left us without an all-important context for the soils we could observe from the lander. (Yes, I know the 2001 lander would have carried Marie Curie, Sojourner's back-up, but depending on where it landed, evaporite outcrop could well have been completely out of reach of the second Brave Little Toaster on Mars, as well...)

So, MER-B would have been sent somewhere else, and our understanding of Mars would possibly be a whole lot less developed than it is right now.

I guess the point I'm making is that the failure of MPL might have been a blessing in disguise -- it led to a chain of events that put the right instrument on the ground in the right place, which might well not have happened had MPL worked and the 2001 lander been sent to Meridiani.

-the other Doug