There is a lot to do, but in some sense we are trying to do something that has never been done before and that is to have a kind of virtual presence on another planet... We don’t know what we’ll find. Will the landing site be like Pathfinder? Will it be totally different? We’ll have a capability to go up to them and explore them, we can go up to the crater rim and look down and explore them... and see what’s there. So keeping that in mind is the incentive to get through this very hard task of putting it all together.

Trying to keep the big picture in mind, the MER project is trying to explore something that has never been explored before. And to do it in a bold and exciting way.

Coming soon much more from John!