William Elliot wrote:

On Mon, 23 Oct 2017, Fred J. McCall wrote:

The chasm, 50km (31 miles) long and 100 metres wide, appears to be structurally
sound and its rocks may contain ice or water deposits that could be turned into
fuel, according to data sent back by the orbiter, nicknamed Kaguya after the moon
princess in a Japanese fairytale."
https://www.theguardian.com/science/...sation-of-moon

should send a rover to check it out
Rovers can't do spelunking. You'd have to send people.

Why? A rover could go in, take a look around and come back to tell us
what it saw.

Rovers are only good on relatively flat ground and even there they
travel slowly to avoid accidents. No way one can go spelunking.

There are robots that walk into volcano craters.
Use one of those.

And send a human with it? Communication lag between your volcano
robot and the operator is?

A few seconds. No big deal like the 8 hrs to Pluto.
The robot could use automonous driving like rovers do.
Simple way is to take a look, go a bit, take another look.
Quick reactions aren't required of a plodder.

So you're going to build a purpose-built rover for this single cave,
including all the software development for autonomous operation...

They've been doing it for Mars rovers, mostly on the fly.
Once done, it could be used for other caves or difficult
parts of Mars, even perhaps caves.


And they've deliberately avoided 'difficult' terrain. As already
noted, Mars is harder because of the communications delay. How much
(flat) ground have Mars rovers covered over the decades? Not much.
And it only gets slower as the terrain gets more difficult.


Just imagine going into the depths of a volcano and running out,
just in time to jet pack away from an eruption. Wow! Wnat pics.


Just imagine magic pixie dust...


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw