Quote Originally Posted by nova_robotics View Post
Were were able to make a bunch of different thing using a very simple process just by melting regolith down to glass. Beyond structural shapes and objects, you can "pave" a safe landing area..
That's really cool, and I've actually played with the same thing! I got one of the Martian garden regolith simulant kits as a gift and melted some of it into glass using a big fresnel lens. Did you have cracking problems? Mine failed immediately on cooling whenever I tried to make anything bigger than a half dollar. Small world.

The reason I want to see a blade on a rover goes back to Spirit. Near the end of its mission it had a busted wheel. Dragging it around caused a little trench behind the rover that wasn't more than an inch deep. In that trench we saw silica deposits unlike anything on the surface. I'd like to see more of what's under there. Drilling into rocks shows us what was captured when the rock was formed, and surface photograph show what things look like after millennia of weathering. There is a huge time gap in the middle that we can't see.

(I am not a scientist or an expert.)