Rovers are the future of space exploration. They are just so much cheaper than sending men. It would be interesting to compare them to the Apollo missions to the moon. At a guess they delivered as much science at a tiny fraction of the cost. They are a lot slower moving than people but they keep going for months, and now perhaps years. The moon missions could only stay for days.
Alexian is being a bit optimistic calling for earthworm probes. If you want to drill a hole you need a drilling rig. There is one planned for the next mobile for mars but I think it a mistake. Mars has already been drilled all over by meteorites.
Personally I would vote for a swarm of rovers with only evolutionary upgrades, rather than a completely new design. This is my wish list:
a) Unfolding solar panel "wings" to give more power. Air pressure is so low that we don't have to worry much about storm damage. They need to be motorised so that they can be aligned to the sun and be raised when travelling over difficult terrain.
b) An electron microscope.
c) Some sort of chromatography.
d) An attachment to the head for cleaning the solar cells.
e) A robot hand.
f) A linescan camera like the HRSC used on the mars express. Rotate slowly in a circle getting one vertical scan line per click of rotation and you get the perfect stereoscopic panoramic image with no pasting. The image would not be just in colour but spectroscopic.
Details here:
http://solarsystem.dlr.de/Missions/e...ameraeng.shtml
g) Caterpillar treads.
