Phil said:

>We need a series of nuclear powered roviz with self-navigation for real
>exploration.

People have been saying this your years. The Viking landers were powered by RTGs and they ran for quite a long time (the RTGs also kept Viking warm during the Martian night). For a rover it's a no brainer. With an RTG, a rover could survey a huge area of Mars. The life span of the two MER rovers is limited by dust collecting on the solar arrays and the number of times the chemical batteries can go through their charge/discharge cycle. A bad choice was made concerning the batteries used for Mars Pathfinder which limited its life span. That error would not have been repeated with MER. I don't understand why windshield whipers were not installed on MER's photovoltaics. There's some technical issue concerning this that I do not understand.

NASA is planning on using RTGs with MSL. That's the good news. Dan Goldin was so politically correct that the engineers dispaired of ever getting RTGs back on Mars. With Goldin gone, RTGs on Mars is less an issue. Unfortunately MSL is stuck politically. MSL was originally called Mars 2005, then it became Mars 2007, then Mars 2009, then Mars Smart Lander (MSL), then the landing technology priced out too high and MSL became Mars Science Lab. MSL is a bit like Spiro Agnew's proposal that there would be a manned Mars base in 1984. This is a big problem!!

Gary