Reply #129: You "send another robot". LOL. Would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

[Statistical]

You make is seem like it is a trivial tasks.

From planning to landing on Mars is about a decade long delay. Also the ability to pick a landing site for these primitive spacecraft is very limited. They kinda aim for the right area but the range of error is in dozens of miles. When you combine that with limited range the ability to get back to a particular location is limited.

It took the probe 88 days to get to the first interesting feature within range. Given that landing site is semi-random that was just luck. It easliy could have been 188 days or 1000 days. The mission is adapted based on the extremely limited tools at disposal of the rover, its limited range, and long delay between each command (20 minutes earth -> mars -> earth). When designing a mission the goals are artificially low because of the probes short lifespan. No matter where Spirit landed it was incapable of going more than 10-30 km. The further is goes the more of its life is spent moving and not researching. So compromises have to be made.



A human could have accomplished Spirit task 739 days in about a day or two. The last 2 years Spirit has been stuck in loose sand because the danger wasn't seen from its limited sensors. It failed to wakeup due to dirt on the panels which could be wiped clean by a human in a matter of seconds.

All the robot exploration of Mars since begining of space program while yielding massive amounts of data is a tiny fraction of what even a modest missions (3-5 astronauts and 90 days on surface) could accomplish.