Value of Moon - ice, meteorites, telerobotics (Score 2)

I also hope this will be a wake up call for the West. Telerobotics is routinely used for sea bed operations (e.g. titanic), remote surgery e.g. famous case of doctor n US operating on patient in France and so on. With modern equipment on the Moon operating a rover there will be hugely different from experiences in the Apollo era. It will be almost like being there. Also of course hugely different from Mars missions where the time delays mean that normally you download images one day and use it to plan everything for the next day and real time operation from Earth is impossible. Also there is much of interest on the Moon. We know almost nothing about its surface, know more probably about Mars than the Moon, since the only samples we have were collected nearly 50 years ago, and most except for the last mission were collected by jet fighter pilots with a few weeks training in geology, and scientists on Earth couldn't see clearly what they were collecting with the low quality video feed. So there may be many interesting rocks that were missed even in the sites already visited by humans. And they only landed in safe places too. Things we could find are - first - the polar deposits of ice, in the permanently dark craters where you can't see them optically. Know hardly anything about what is there, and it may have layered deposits of ice and organics from the ancient solar system. Meteorites on the surface from billions of years old Earth, Venus and Mars. They should be there, only thing is, are they on the surface, or buried deep so you have to dig to find them. They would be uncontaminated by present day Earth life, so could tell us a lot about early solar system. To find out more about lunar geology of course. And I very much hope, experience of telerobotic operation on the Moon may alert Nasa to the huge difference telerobotic exploration could make on Mars. With all the emphasis on human missions to the surface, the idea of exploring it telerobotically from orbit around Mars gets hardly any attention. Yet, studies show that humans in orbit around Mars could do the same amount of exploration as at least 3 parties on the surface, for of course vastly less cost. It makes no sense at all to send humans to the surface for exploration, no financial sense, because humans on the surface in their clumsy gloves and spacesuits won't be able to do much anyway is going to be much more effective to work via telerobotics. And there is no way human missions to the surface can be sterilized to teh same levels as an unmanned rover, so surely greatly increased risk of contaminating Mars, and so confusing our sensitive experiments which are so sensitive they can e.g. detect a single amino acid in a gram of soil (that's the astrobionibbler, not yet flown but hopefully will on some future mission). Plus DNA seequencers ditto able to detect a single DNA molecule in a sample, and so on.