Last week's cover story in Nature is a 6-page review of the UA's Phoenix Mars Lander mission, from how it came to be to the last . And despite my following the mission from the landing to the last message and aftermath, I learned a lot more about the mission from this article. The title for this post came from a line in the article.
There's an interesting section on NASA's stepping and taking over control of the mission when they had problems getting the scoops of soil into the TEGA for analysis. It turns out the brackets at the base of the cover were a hair's width too big and blocked the doors.