that's interesting...

[jay]

Early results...
Remote-rovers, terrestrial-controlled (w/delays) observation rate = 0.12
Remote-rovers, Mars-controlled (w/o delays) obs rate = 1 (normalized)
Spacesuited human, obs rate = 5
Shirtsleeve - free human geologist, obs rate = 27

There are too few datapoints to say definitively, but these results imply that a local spacesuited human has something like 40x the science productivity of a Earth-controlled rover...

Comments

[hopeforyou.livejournal.com]

Hah. So the nay sayers can put *that* in thier "robotic missions only" pipe, and smoke it.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

I could now argue that $20B for a 30-day human mission would be cost-effective, compared to the cost of acquiring the same amount of observations purely robotically. Of course, a $20B mission combining humans and robots would likely be better still...