Are manned missions needed to explore Mars and beyond?

The United States has pledged to colonize the Moon by 2020 and send astronauts to Mars, but many scientists say dangerous and costly manned space missions should be a thing of the past, not the future. Intelligent robots and satellites such as those already exploring the Red Planet, they say, do a good job and are a lot less fragile than human organisms too easily stranded millions of miles from home. "We are many decades from robots that can match humans, even in the lab, and laboratory robotics is about 20 years ahead of space robotics," Steve Squyres, an astronomy professor at Cornell University and principal investigator of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, recently told a science forum.

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