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Robotic rendezvous isn’t particularly hard, as long as you can land nearby. Robotic rendezvous happens regularly at ISS, and being on a planet should be even ea

Robotic rendezvous isn’t particularly hard, as long as you can land nearby. Robotic rendezvous happens regularly at ISS, and being on a planet should be even easier as you don’t have to worry about orbital mechanics or the fact that in orbit, things are moving around. On the surface, speeds are low and everything is sitting on the surface so it’s basically quasistatic. Also, except for the landing bit, it’s basically done by autonomy-assisted remote control. It’s not “Level 5 Self-Driving” or whatever. Also, picking a random sample near the landing site is not optimal. You want to pick really good samples. A rover like Perseverance that can take years to collect the very best samples over distances of several miles is much better. Remember, we already have “random” samples from Mars in the form of Martian meteorites on Earth. We want particularly good samples.

jessriedel 6y ago
The ISS has human operators in real time, so it's just remote operation. And ISS work still requires human intervention (with hands) for most complicated things. The only things that are done without real-time control are things that were failure prone in the past but have be mastered over years. And even then, the Russian autonomous docking system recently had major issues. The mention of self-driving cars, orbital speed, and the suggestion of sampling near the landing site all appears to be responding to an argument I didn't make. Most importantly, you haven't addressed my point, widely appreciated in spaceflight, that novel untested mechanisms are always one of the primary sources of risk.