Meaning visiting extra locations and gathering samples farther afield. The crew of Apollo 17, as an example, drove roughly 35 kilometers (about 22 miles) on the Moon over three days. Traversing that very same distance took NASA’s Alternative Mars rover greater than eight years.
An astronaut’s contact
Gathering information on one other world seems like one thing you might automate like a farm. However in lots of instances, it seems to be extra like working a backyard: one thing that takes a fragile contact and a way of nuance. That’s the place individuals work finest. Any experiment that requires cautious dealing with, scouting, or setup is nearly all the time higher left to astronauts.
The devices slated for Artemis III, this system’s first Moon touchdown mission, are good examples. Astronauts must fastidiously choose vegetation in a terrarium-like experiment, scout the perfect location for a soil probe, and alter a seismometer to be in good contact with the bottom. These duties could be troublesome for a robotic to do, however are comparatively easy for an astronaut.
Greater, extra advanced experiments will rely upon astronauts much more. Megaprojects like massive drills, enormous telescopes, and sprawling factories to extract sources could all want extra development and troubleshooting than robots can do on their very own. This is the reason many individuals think about a future for lunar exploration — no less than, with something resembling present know-how — that will depend on crewed missions.
