given murphy's law....there are just so many things that can go wrong
that will. It appears that the wheels all have independent drives and
i really wonder about a system like that. Had i designed a mars rover i
would have considered a larger rubber ball with an inner gyro /flywheel
assemblege inside of it to move it along and probably with an internal
nuclear engine to power it and a thermostat controled area for
mechanical equipment especially the onboard data control features. as
for retractable scientific equipment probes and montiors that would take
some thinking....but thanks to the planet's gravity i can definately
simplify retraction methods by allowing a rotation to allow a lock to
unlatch and the equipment to fall into place rather than using all those
solinoids and rotors or hydrolics or pistons etc....less complexity the
better.

Im not saying that these are not brilliantly designed pieces of
equipment just that they may be overly designed. Nature seems to
prefer streamlined organisms and we see more of that kind of
streamlining in our terrestrial automotive industry than we do up on the
business of mars probes at the moment.

The good thing about the complexity of the probes is that we are getting
a lot of trial and error experience with remote controlled systems.

If i were in charge at nasa at the moment I would be thinking more in
terms of an unmanned mars resource exploitation mission than a manned
mission .

The first thing i would consider for moon exploration is to use satalite
balistics to crator the moon a bit and observe exactly what happens. It
seems kind of interesting to me that no one has ever observed the moon
getting hit with a meteror...even a tiny one????

we observe this on earth fairly frequently. the tell tail signs of a
meteor hit on the moon is not anything burning up in an atmosphere...but
rather a bit "dusting" at the surface.