...It contaminates and confuses everything. Each new crop of postdoc students at the "space" universities, and junior managers at NASA feel that they MUST do "something", and do it NOW.

Sure, we must do something, sometime, but there's no rush. Mars will not change, Enceladus and Europa will not change, much. Not in one decade or one century.

Let's spend some time miniaturising and optimising a DESIGN for a mission, then test it and debug it, then stamp out 100 or 1000 copies at low cost and send them on their merry way to many diverse locations on our target planet(s) so that we can compare oranges with homonymous citrus fruits.

The dreadful imperative to design RIGHT NOW a "bleeding edge" technology that will be absolutely the bees knees is what leads, imho, to mission losses - TOO MUCH innovation, not enough testing. And if the mission IS successful, we spend ages puzzling about how the results are different from last mission - with different imaginbg techniques and covering different, almost randomly sampled, areas.

So much better to embark on a programme of systematic and co-ordinated data acquisition, to map things properly, steadily, and sensiby.

Of course, I appreciate the ever-increasing quality and resolution of data that comes from Mars, but it really would be MUCH more sensible to spend about half as much money on new missions, and TEN times as much on data management, acquisition, and interpretation. That's the real balance. For every piece of hardware we build, we subsidise engineers and technicians, at the expense of scientists and interpreters. I see the balance as being too far on the hardware and innovation side, and not enough on the curatorial and research side - how close have we come to losing data from old missions because it was sidelined for lack of proper budget to analyse and archive it properly, in the face of the strong winds of technology change that simultaneously make new missions so much better.

If we were to be honest, we'd print the pictures from Mars on Fortune Cookies. - "Throw them away, they will be superceded in one or two mission's time anyway. We don't need to make efforts to save the data"

I've seen examples of unique and irreplacable data on hypersonic flight, planetary physics, and spacecraft design consigned to the dumpster for lack of a library budget. - At the same time as the old wind tunnels and computer routines are being trashed because "We have already done all the basic research and there is no further need"

The rush for the new, prematurely devalues the "old", before we've wrung the details out of it.

Slow and steady is not a crime. It's a sensible strategy, most of the time.