This is because there are increasingly fewer big discoveries to be made. No, an astronaut with a shovel won't excavate a lost Martian city, it'll be more of ISS science but in gravity and with sanitizer smelling dust.
We haven't even realistically begun to explore Mars. There are vast underground cave systems, it's still unknown what lays under the moist surface areas, and so on endlessly. Heck, we haven't even been able to expose subsurface strata. Even searching for metal deposits will be extremely important. But these are things we can't realistically do with rovers anytime in the foreseeable future.
> But these are things we can't realistically do with rovers anytime in the foreseeable future.
If you read the article, you'll see that these are things that we can't realistically do with humans anytime in the foreseeable future.
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