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The Curiosity rover has driven 9 miles in a little over four years on Mars. The Lunar Rover that came with Apollo 17 drove 22 miles in a little over 4 HOURS.
by elsonrodriguez 10y ago
The Curiosity rover has driven 9 miles in a little over four years on Mars.
The Lunar Rover that came with Apollo 17 drove 22 miles in a little over 4 HOURS.
As it turns out, humans are the best robots.
- Pinckney 10y agoAnother way to view it is that human rovers must go fast, because humans are impatient. We could build a faster, battery powered robotic rover if we wanted, but why? If it's simply mileage you want, Curiosity's RTG means it can just keep going for years. With an average speed of 30 meters/hr, I'm not seeing much reason to think that it wasn't capable of covering ~1000km over those 4 years (the LRV, on the other hand, could never exceed 92km, total, before the batteries ran out). But mileage simply wasn't the goal.
- grkvlt 10y agoYes, but with my super-rover-transporter system, we can cover 5,400 miles in the same time, with the 600 rovers. I'm envisaging a sort of airbag deployment system (like pathfinder) coupled with a dispenser system that fires a rover out every few minutes as the ship orbits the planet, for optimal coverage.
- elsonrodriguez 10y agoBut to what end? Bigger and better probes? Finer and finer data points? We can send probes forever, but when do WE go? My underlying point is that we have enough data to start making attempts at settling Mars, and once we're there, we'll do more science and exploration than any existing robot can. If you doubt that, then show me a robot that can perform an archeological dig on a fossil site without destroying half of the fossils.