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

**Jeff Findley**

In article -
hdakotatelephone,
says...

On 1/20/2011 2:58 AM, Jochem Huhmann wrote:
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.

And the nice thing is, you don't have to worry about getting the rovers
back either; in fact, the longer they stay, the better.
I always thought we should have built more MER's, considering how well
Spirit and Opportunity did and the low cost of the whole program.

Double edged sword.

Abandoning unmanned probes on Mars means that they can't return samples
to Earth. A manned mission which returns people to Earth will
undoubtedly return samples too. Mars samples in an Earth lab would be
called "invaluable" by geologists, biologists, and other scientists on
earth.

Jeff
--
"Had Constellation actually been focused on building an Earth-Moon
transportation system, it might have survived. The decision to have it
first build a costly and superfluous Earth-to-orbit transportation
system (Ares I) was a fatal mistake.", Henry Spencer 1/2/2011