Posted by jburk to Mars Polar Lander at December 1, 1999 12:00 PM

They sit on a narrow table in Sarah Gavit's office - rugged, ugly-looking chunks of metal that have been heated and frozen to extremes and slammed viciously into the ground. They are rejected versions of NASA's Deep Space 2 probes currently hitchhiking a ride to the Red Planet on the agency's Mars Polar Lander.