We were discussing this a while back on the Blog " not in my life time" sorry no time to dig that out; in there I talked about the various Unmanned Missions planned, we all want a Manned Mission but Unmanned is the only possibility for now. My understanding of the Phobos Grunt Mission is it needs part funding from a paying Hitchhiker from China called Yingou-1 that will go into orbit around Mars but there has been no confirmation it had all been synchronised for that launch window. Not that we would know until they were both off the Earth and on their way.
The ovens on Pheonix could barely take a grain of dust and I hope we have learned what those oven requirements are after that mission to get a decent sample in and conduct a good experiment. But as someone on the last thread pointed out Bots don't think or react quick enough that is why I advocate returning it to the ISS for analysis so a Human can carry out the experiments plus we could get some serious kit up there.
ExoMars will carry top of the range cameras spectrometers and imagers but its main USP will be a drill and will carry the Life Marker Chip to sniff out the smallest hints of biomarkers, organic molecules of extinct or extant life so not realy an out an out Geologist.
MSL I believe will be able to pop Rocks into an internal Lab but as I say hopefully big enough and hot enough to get these sort of results and say yeah we have the same Meteorites up here as you have down there.
That would be cool if we found the same stuff up there as on Earth and then we would know we were the same at one point as was Venus somehow we struck lucky with our Magneticsphere. Maybe having the largest Moon in the Solar System is the difference creating the right tidal conditions to preserve us.
