The future of Mars exploration will be greatly enhanced by humans that make the sojourn to the Red Planet. The work that could be performed by astronaut crews on that distant world would far outstrip what mechanized Mars machinery can attain - but certainly at a far greater cost.
To that end, NASA is blueprinting a moon-to-Mars strategy that identifies science as one of three pillars upon which the agency's quest for a sustained human exploration throughout the solar system is built. What's now being plotting out is the architecture for achieving that goal.
