Barack Obama: America Will Take the Giant Leap to Mars

Re:Barack Obama: America Will Take the Giant Leap to Mars by Retric on Tuesday October 11, 2016 @11:41AM (#12685400)

just to sample a rock probably takes a week No, rovers are actually better than people at this stuff. A human can pick up a rock, a robot can do mass spectroscopy without picking it up.

Further, you can send a 50+ ton's worth of rovers instead of 1 person who needs to spend most of their time inside and wast all this time sleeping and eating etc.

PS: At best a human can take pictures while holding a camera 'just like a robot'. Notice how you need to send a camera in both cases.

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Re:Barack Obama: America Will Take the Giant Leap to Mars by TaylorAlexander on Tuesday October 11, 2016 @02:19PM (#12687053)

I bet the time between noticing a new rock and taking a sample is more than a day for NASA. They have extremely limited time for what a rover can do. Have you seen the documentaries where they describe all the work that goes in to planning each move? I still think a human scientist could collect more rocks and take more samples in one day than NASA does in practice with a rover like curiosity.

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Re:Barack Obama: America Will Take the Giant Leap to Mars by Retric on Tuesday October 11, 2016 @02:39PM (#12687291)

It's a false dichotomy to assume it's one human or one rover. It's one human or ~100 rovers. More importrantly it's one human with 1 mass spectrometer or 100 rovers with 100 mass spectrometers.

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