The rover's mission is to search for signs that Mars once might have had water, a prerequisite for life as we know it. But to JPL, this criterion appears to exclude investigation of relatively spectacular finds, such as extant flowing water. The possible mud raked up by one of the lander's airbags may have indicated exactly this, yet JPL steered the rover away in a hurry -- but not after commenting on how "bizarre" it looked. (It bears noting that Dr. Gilbert Levin, former Viking project scientist, doesn't think it's "bizarre" at all: he's been insisting for years that JPL's vision of a Moon-like, barren Mars is fatally flawed.)
More recently, JPL turned the Spirit rover away from a unique, dark-colored rock the science team had nicknamed "Sushi." This rock sports an anomalous geometric cavity, making it an especially interesting find. But JPL elected to abandon Sushi as a target for surface drilling because they claimed it looked too "dusty." This claim is highly suspect; even a cursory examination of the rocks at the Spirit site shows that Sushi is not just dust-free, but downright shiny, as if subjected to high heat or glazed with some kind of natural "varnish." What is that stuff? Why not drill?
It's the ultimate irony: we send a survey vehicle to another planet and immediately start seeking the familiar, dismissing any oddities that crop up as "bizarre" or "impossible" and making tracks to the nearest available dune or rock that appears safe for intellectual consumption. JPL's behavior makes even less sense when one remembers that haste is of the essence -- Spirit could cease transmitting at any time.
The Spirit Mars Exploration Rover is an unconditional technical triumph. JPL has shown that it has the engineering mettle to place highly capable surrogate astronauts on the Martian surface. But, disturbingly, the sense of adventure appears to end with the hardware itself.
Conveniently unchallenged by a public conditioned to take the words of "rocket scientists" at face value, JPL is already forming some very bad habits: a refusal to acknowledge the unknown and a crippling immunity to the unexpected.
"All the faces
All the voices blur
Change to one face
Change to one voice
Prepare yourself for bed
The light seems bright
And glares on white walls . . ."
--The Cure, "Charlotte Sometimes"
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