http://www.planetary.org/news/2006/0...Mars_Mars.html

Nobody was happier than Dan McCleese, the Mars chief scientist at JPL,
and the principal investigator of the Mars Climate Sounder, a weather
satellite and one of the six science instruments onboard MRO. "It feels
great!" exclaimed McCleese.

The lessons learned from past failures, said McCleese, is that cheap
doesn't work. "With Mars Observer and Mars Climate Orbiter -- the two
examples where we failed -- we tried to do it as cheaply as we could;
therefore the people standing behind the people who are watching the
people doing the work weren't there. Here we had checks and rechecks,
redundant systems, testing that we had not done previously, and we were
in the hands of very capable people. The future exploration of the
planet, in my view, is that it pays to spend the time and money to do it
right."