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You can first send robot to do slow and simple things, but once you want to do more, humans are much more effective. From Steven Squyres, NASA Mars Rover Princ

You can first send robot to do slow and simple things, but once you want to do more, humans are much more effective. From Steven Squyres, NASA Mars Rover Principal investigator: > What Spirit and Opportunity typically achieve in a day, a human explorer could do in less than a minute. The Opportunity rover has traversed about 17 km in its five and a half year lifetime; this is less than the distance covered by two astronauts in their Lunar Roving Vehicle in a single EVA on Apollo 17.

Retric 7y ago
What an odd metric. The moon cars only averaged 30 km total per mission, meanwhile we can send a hundred rovers for the same price. That’s why people think sending humans for brief trips is pointless. It’s the instruments you’re sending that collect data and sending people means you get vastly less data back, for the same price. Self sustaining colonization is a worthwhile goal. Having people wander around on the surface of the Moon or Mars does not get you there anymore than learning to jump really high can teach you to fly.
- dotancohen 7y ago
  > it’s the instruments you’re sending that collect data When you know what data you want to collect (temperature, pressure, chemical composition) then I agree that robots are far more efficient. However, humans will measure the things that you didn't know were there. Discovery. There were countless examples from the Lunar missions. Just as an example that comes to mind, we sent no colour cameras to the lunar surface as "there was nothing of colour to photograph". Despite that, I believe on the last lunar landing Schmidt (or Cernan?) noticed that the regolith was actually orange in some places. You could argue that instead of a black and white camera, a colour camera could have been sent. But that is a different instrument package, and just as likely a million other sensor packages could have been sent. That is one human advantage - we have an extremely extensive array of sensors that come with us. In addition to those sensors, humans have processing and reasoning skills, dexterous hands, mobile legs, random-access memory, and are preprogrammed to solve problems, take interest in anomilies, and make connections between seemingly-disparate events.
  - Retric 7y ago
    We did send color cameras to the moon. Earthrise being a rather famous example: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1249.html https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1... As are those color photos of the lunar flag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Flag_Assembly#targetText=The%20Lunar%20Flag%20Assembly%20(LFA,one%2Dinch%20anodized%20aluminum%20tubes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Flag_Assembly#targetText...
  - dr_zoidberg 7y ago
    During Apollo, color cameras were sent to the moon (both photographic and video cameras). But the "disease" you're pointing at rings a bell in my mind: the JunoCam. If it had been for the science team, Juno would've gone without it. It was added as a late-time PR addition, based on hardware from a previous mission (the descent imager of the Curiosity rover). And yet, it has given some of the most astounding images from Jupiter we've ever seen.
    - baq 7y ago
      it was designed to do exactly that though, those images simply aren't that interesting from a scientific perspective - but the scientists finally understood that public perception of science is at least in the same order of magnitude of importance as scientific results themselves.
  - wnkrshm 7y ago
    Robotic missions have all the mental skills of humans, the decision making in a robotic mission is on-par if not even superior because of time constraints being virtually absent. What robots lack as of yet are the motor skills. Edit: I'm talking of course about non-autonomous missions.
- martyvis 7y ago
  We can send hundreds but we didn't. The problem with the current generation of robots is that they pretty much need to have to plan out a full fault tree for every planned experiment and mitigate potential issues with a lot of prepared hardware. Humans can be sent with a fairly generic set of tools, instruments and materials and more readily adapt their plans and experiments too the situation. I'm sure robots get better every generation, but we aren't there yet.
- Gravityloss 7y ago
  They are examples. I've heard about how a geologist on Mars could do so much. But sending humans to Mars too early, they won't get any science or infrastructure development done, it's just going to be super expensive trying to stay alive, maybe plant a flag for political purposes. A mission probably could retire engineering risk and proof operational practices etc. Even Apollo, with a very limited time run, had significant evolution of the missions. With Mars the launch opportunity gap problem is significant, hurting iteration speed. Anyway, for more than tiny scale space faring, we probably need to get our resources from asteroids. Asteroid resources are the key to space.
dikei 7y ago
What about the energy efficiency though ? Would it take less energy to keep the robots alive for 2.5 years than bringing 2 astronauts there and back ?
- dotancohen 7y ago
  Would you rather have 2.5 years of the same types of measurements (temp, pressure, magnetic flux) because you only sent those instruments, or a week of completely serendipitous data (orange regolith, the smell of lunar surface after reclosing the hatch, many others)?
  - bluGill 7y ago
    I need both for different reasons.
maxerickson 7y ago
Odd that he didn't compare them to the human expeditions to Mars.

Retric 7y ago

What an odd metric. The moon cars only averaged 30 km total per mission, meanwhile we can send a hundred rovers for the same price. That’s why people think sending humans for brief trips is pointless. It’s the instruments you’re sending that collect data and sending people means you get vastly less data back, for the same price. Self sustaining colonization is a worthwhile goal. Having people wander around on the surface of the Moon or Mars does not get you there anymore than learning to jump really high can teach you to fly.

dotancohen 7y ago
> it’s the instruments you’re sending that collect data When you know what data you want to collect (temperature, pressure, chemical composition) then I agree that robots are far more efficient. However, humans will measure the things that you didn't know were there. Discovery. There were countless examples from the Lunar missions. Just as an example that comes to mind, we sent no colour cameras to the lunar surface as "there was nothing of colour to photograph". Despite that, I believe on the last lunar landing Schmidt (or Cernan?) noticed that the regolith was actually orange in some places. You could argue that instead of a black and white camera, a colour camera could have been sent. But that is a different instrument package, and just as likely a million other sensor packages could have been sent. That is one human advantage - we have an extremely extensive array of sensors that come with us. In addition to those sensors, humans have processing and reasoning skills, dexterous hands, mobile legs, random-access memory, and are preprogrammed to solve problems, take interest in anomilies, and make connections between seemingly-disparate events.
- Retric 7y ago
  We did send color cameras to the moon. Earthrise being a rather famous example: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1249.html https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1... As are those color photos of the lunar flag: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Flag_Assembly#targetText=The%20Lunar%20Flag%20Assembly%20(LFA,one%2Dinch%20anodized%20aluminum%20tubes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Flag_Assembly#targetText...
- dr_zoidberg 7y ago
  During Apollo, color cameras were sent to the moon (both photographic and video cameras). But the "disease" you're pointing at rings a bell in my mind: the JunoCam. If it had been for the science team, Juno would've gone without it. It was added as a late-time PR addition, based on hardware from a previous mission (the descent imager of the Curiosity rover). And yet, it has given some of the most astounding images from Jupiter we've ever seen.
  - baq 7y ago
    it was designed to do exactly that though, those images simply aren't that interesting from a scientific perspective - but the scientists finally understood that public perception of science is at least in the same order of magnitude of importance as scientific results themselves.
- wnkrshm 7y ago
  Robotic missions have all the mental skills of humans, the decision making in a robotic mission is on-par if not even superior because of time constraints being virtually absent. What robots lack as of yet are the motor skills. Edit: I'm talking of course about non-autonomous missions.
martyvis 7y ago
We can send hundreds but we didn't. The problem with the current generation of robots is that they pretty much need to have to plan out a full fault tree for every planned experiment and mitigate potential issues with a lot of prepared hardware. Humans can be sent with a fairly generic set of tools, instruments and materials and more readily adapt their plans and experiments too the situation. I'm sure robots get better every generation, but we aren't there yet.
Gravityloss 7y ago
They are examples. I've heard about how a geologist on Mars could do so much. But sending humans to Mars too early, they won't get any science or infrastructure development done, it's just going to be super expensive trying to stay alive, maybe plant a flag for political purposes. A mission probably could retire engineering risk and proof operational practices etc. Even Apollo, with a very limited time run, had significant evolution of the missions. With Mars the launch opportunity gap problem is significant, hurting iteration speed. Anyway, for more than tiny scale space faring, we probably need to get our resources from asteroids. Asteroid resources are the key to space.

dikei 7y ago

What about the energy efficiency though ? Would it take less energy to keep the robots alive for 2.5 years than bringing 2 astronauts there and back ?

dotancohen 7y ago
Would you rather have 2.5 years of the same types of measurements (temp, pressure, magnetic flux) because you only sent those instruments, or a week of completely serendipitous data (orange regolith, the smell of lunar surface after reclosing the hatch, many others)?
- bluGill 7y ago
  I need both for different reasons.

maxerickson 7y ago

Odd that he didn't compare them to the human expeditions to Mars.