QUESTION:
How much public interest do you think there will be in the Mars Global
Surveyor mission as comapred to the Pathfinder mission?  Do you think that
the public will brush it off and say it's "just another Mars mission"?

ANSWER from Peter Thomas on September 1, 1997:
I suspect there will be somewhat less interest because:

It's an orbital mission that will do its work slowly, and will send few
pictures early on as it goes through the aerobraking. Also, it is a bit
harder for a lot of people to relate to distant vertical views of a world
than to those taken on the surface at eyeball height!

However, depending on what we see, especially with the high resolution
camera, the findings themselves may attract much public attention, and
hopefully help make the point that it takes many different kinds of missions
to explore a planet.  Think of all the different kinds of explorations on
the Earth's continents and oceans, and the fact we still find fundamentally
new things about the earth.

Scientifically, MGS has the potential to be extremely rich, because its
instruments were selected and designed after previous missions indicated
what some of the important questions and measurements are.