When I read the Mar Rover article this morning, I was thinking it seems like we can apply the same technologies on the surface of Earth to explore Oceans, Antarctica, Arctic areas, Sahara Desert, Gobi Desert, Amazon Jungle, where there were not enough human explorations so far and to collect data and to solve some technology challenges to build machines/computers/communications systems that can roaming on those environments and economically way to sustain those information gathering efforts. (including replacement/dropping off those bots in those difficult areas)

I suddenly understood most our knowledge on those locations are probably based on few high resolution statistical samplings done in human explorations plus low resolution statistical sampling from Satellites Images. It may be good to build those bots to have real time high resolution sampling and let data scientists discover more facts and knowledge!