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by mandevil 1880 days ago
Right, but the lunar science was not just limited to sample return, and here the J missions (Apollo 15-17) with their SIM bay cameras produced much better image quality than even Lunar Orbiter for much of the Moon's surface (Lunar Orbiter 5, in the polar orbit, was able to map parts of the Moon that the J missions never saw.) Similarly, the rover's traveled farther than the Lunkhod's did, showing us a much greater area of the surface. And the most sophisticated scientific instrument ever to go to the moon, even today, would be Harrison Schmitt, with his Harvard Geology Ph.D brain and hands.

As for "done with 1960's technology" so was Apollo: the ability to discover hydrogen (used to find the ice in the lunar crater shadows) wasn't possible with 1960's sensors that were light enough even for the much larger mass and power budgets of an Apollo spacecraft (vis a vis Lunar Orbiter or similar probe).
1 comments
vkou 1880 days ago
Robotics has advanced a lot further from the 60s than the ability of people wearing space suits to manipulate instruments.

In fact, the latter hasn't really advanced at all in those 60 years.

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mandevil 1880 days ago
By the nature of the beast, a spacecraft with humans is going to have absolutely thunderous mass and energy budgets compared to robotic ones, so any instrument you can put on a robot you can put on a manned mission.

In a similar manner, I would expect any manned mission to Mars to employ a lot of robots: control is much easier when the human making the decisions is a few light seconds away versus 8 light minutes. And if you have the mass (and money) for a manned mission, you can tuck in a bunch of robots for very little extra. So a human mission will always be strictly greater than (in scientific return and cash budget) robot mission.

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vkou 1879 days ago
> By the nature of the beast, a spacecraft with humans is going to have absolutely thunderous mass and energy budgets compared to robotic ones, so any instrument you can put on a robot you can put on a manned mission.

By the nature of the beast, for the cost of a single manned mission, you can launch dozens of expendable, unmanned missions, that can go on for more than a few days. Robots don't need to eat, or breathe, and they don't grouse when you abandon them on an alien surface.

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