In a way, it's an indictment of NASA's budgetary allocation that cutting-edge research into autonomous robotics is done on-the-fly during a real mission. In a better world, there would be research teams doing this stuff on Earth, in rock gardens to simulate Mars, or Venus, or the Moon, or wherever. Only the good stuff would be fed back into the missions.

It's not all bad, it is clearly a very authentic "realisation", and it has the advantage that problems will occur that were not imagined.

But I start to hear a tone in these PR statements that sounds as if the mission operators sense the end of the missions coming. Whether it's accumulated degradation, or a limit to funding, I sense an "end-of-an-era" message.