> and that's the true bottleneck. Are you sure? My understanding was that the biggest bottleneck lay in the fact that the orbiters could only communicated wit

> and that's the true bottleneck. Are you sure? My understanding was that the biggest bottleneck lay in the fact that the orbiters could only communicated with the lander for 8 minutes per day. Fairly crippling :) > Not to mention wireless communications are not "free" as any smartphone owner probably knows and the rover's daily energy budget is pretty much fixed I understood the energy source gave a fixed output - it's not a daily budger per se. So 2 hours communications (rather than 8 minutes) wouldn't leave it unable to move for the rest of the day. I could be wrong. However; if it takes a week to send it an update - or to receive big pictures - that implies delays in its work anyway. I agree that the MRO is a significant improvement. I was just idly pointing out that if the aim is to go to Mars more it would be worth investing in infrastructure as much as science.