After watching Spirit land on mars, I became very dissapointed. The one color picture released looke like the 1976 viking photo. Yet it seems as if we just landed on mars for the first time in mainstream media. With the controversy over the Cydonia region, and countless other photos that appear from the Orbiter. Why would NASA choose to land in the most uninteresting place on Mars?

Only a narrow band of Mars was a suitable candidate for the rovers to land. It had to be free of major rock formations that could have punctured the airbags during landing, be near the Martian equator, so that enough sunlight existed to power the rechargable batteries and also be at the right altitude, so it's not too cold.

One of the primary missions is to find traces of water, and a canal leading into Gusev Crater e.g. was one indicator that it may have been a lake bed in the past.

The images may look the same, but the resolution is much higher than what we had during Viking. NASA also included a new set of instruments that will hopefully provide a greater depth of insight than a few pretty pictures that make nice postcards.

NASA is out to do some true scientific research and not simply pay $890 million dollars to disprove the notion that a certain rock formation is an artificial structure built to look like a face (something, which has already been done anyway).