Comment by BotJunkie

The most likely way for MSH to get funded in the near term is as part of NASA's sample return goals. 5kg of science payload is not insubstantial, but even if MSH's primary instrument was just a sampling tool, it could still do some unique stuff. It could collect otherwise inaccessible samples from across a very wide area, and then bring them all back to a centralized location, which a rover can't do very well.