Steve Squyeres commented recently that a human on scene could have done everything the MERs have done in a week, and that plus the Ballard connection had me thinking about where that 5 year - 1 week difference comes from.

One thing worth noting is that if I'm understanding their ops correctly, it's not the lightspeed delay as much as the once or twice a day relay pass plus limited bandwidth. If you had an aerosynchronus comsat and more transmit power, you could have a much shorter decision loop.

Then again, maybe not. In addition to the power limits and time to run some observations, there's also the question of operations planning keeping up with actual operations.

You'd probably need a much larger ops staff since you'd be making many more decisions per day; at current staff levels I bet you'd hit a man-hours constraint quickly. And even then, a problem that takes 10 hours for someone to think through can not necessarily be thought through by 10 people in one hour. Plus the software tools they have may or may not facilitate putting together sequences so quickly.

In some situations they could probably run as many ops cycles as the rovers' power situation would allow. Other times, like when they need to run experiments in the "sandbox" to get unstuck or plan out really intricate IDD movements, a shorter comm cycle wouldn't make much difference.