SpaceBanter.com - View Single Post - Once and for all...are humans or robots better for Mars?

**Jochem Huhmann**

(Derek Lyons) writes:

"Sea Wasp (Ryk E. Spoor)" wrote:

When those eyes can pick up a rock, break it open with an appropriate
tool, run requisite tests on it, run over the next hill to check
something at a speed somewhat faster than a drugged snail, notice
something about the rock based on its heft or other details not easily
gotten over a remote, time-lagged link, and the billion other things
that a human being can do without even pausing to wonder how they did
it, yes, you might have a point.

ISTR, about a year into their mission(s), Steven Squires (head honcho
of the rover program) being quoted as saying that a human geologist
could do what either rover had done in a year - in thirty days.

Which means that this geologist would have to be there for 5 months to
do what Opportunity or Spirit did. And transporting him and everything
he needs there (including fuel for getting him back) would mean that
would need some orders of magnitude more mass and money. Looks like a
bad deal to me.

Or to turn that around: Look at a one-way robotic mission that gets the
same mass to Mars as a manned mission needs. Then compare which mission
can do more. You could spray hundreds or thousands of rovers over Mars
for the same mass that a small crew needs just to stumble around in the
dust near their lander for three months and then return.

Jochem

--
"A designer knows he has arrived at perfection not when there is no
longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery