One [very unscientific] reason to send a robotic rover to Mars: It's cool. We're able to get a sense of what it's like on another planet - a place it takes a rocket 296 days to reach! NASA hopes the Phoenix Lander will help scientists figure out if life is possible on the Red Planet. But here's the hitch: Phoenix cost $557 million. And I don't mean the mission; I mean the robot alone.

We've learned a lot about our solar system by sending spacecraft into it, but space exploration has never come cheap. How valuable is it to you?

Carl Azuz, Anchor