[acdha]

I think it’s a bit more complicated than that - yes, a ton of great science has been done but there is also a considerable amount of time spent working around limitations, too, and some of those lead to less science being done over the life of the mission.

As a simple example, greater autonomy might allow the rovers to do more by avoiding the number of times where they have to wait for the speed of light (20 minute one-way latency plus annual blackouts) & bandwidth delays for someone at JPL to learn about an obstacle, decide what to do, send commands, and see what happens. They’ve spent a lot of time doing that cautiously because the failure mode of some outcomes is losing a rover, but there are other scenarios where the same is true in the other direction so I’m sure they’re keenly working on ways to make it better able to handle safety navigation and various recovery scenarios for things like losing communications, but I’d expect that might come in the form of a system which operates as they have but logs what it would have done so they can compare the human and robotic commands.