And lets face it....the rovers are SOOOO much more capable .......
They analyze rocks and make pictures, right? It's still a lottery
whether they landed in an area where interesting stuff is not
more than 500m away.

Yeah...but its ONE hell of a crap shoot to hope the interesting rock/soil
happens to be UNDERNEATH where you randomly landed vs within a few hundred
meters (or more)...

The rovers possible sample size is so much bigger that there is no
comparision...

The rovers should be able to analyze dozens of rocks, produce very high quality
images of hundreds and decent quality images of thousands....

And geologists can tell ALOT just from looking at rocks....so calling the
pictures just pretty is very misleading.....I'd even go so far as to say if the
geologist had a choice of just analyzing one rock or being able to quality
image a few dozen they would pick the imaging...

take care

It just bugs me that people keep talking about how cheap the Beagle
is/was....sure it was and a VW bug is cheaper than commercial dump
truck.....so what?

Blll