You'd probably be interested in Curiosity's AEGIS system if you aren't already aware of it.

I get your point but the payload delivered to Mars was 3,893 kg. Entry/descent/landing system: aeroshell + heat shield + parachute + fueled descent stage / sky crane + Fueled Cruise Stage.

> much more science in the same amount of time.

I'm not convinced by the time argument, as astronauts would have limited time on Mars dictated by orbital mechanics and return schedules, but the bigger problem is cost. You are replying to a comment about how rovers and probes are cost effective; there is no way that crewed exploration could accomplish more science than Mars rovers without orders of magnitude more cost.

Manned missions would still have constraints. In some cases, they would be far greater (e.g. due to the necessity of keeping the astronauts alive). Where there are fewer constraints, it would be intertwined with the cost of sending people to Mars. They may be able to travel faster, but a lot of that is going to be because of a larger energy budget. It is doubtful they could travel further, since there are still going to be limits on how far they could travel (humans need infrastructure). That said, perhaps they could cover a larger area (within a smaller radius) than robots. Risk is also a limiting factor, and it is a far bigger one with people. Humans may be more flexible, but you aren't going to have those romantic scenes of people scaling down steep slopes or spelunking in caves. It could be done, but the chances of something going wrong will inhibit it.

While on the topic of human flexibility, it is important to understand that it will be limited due to the resources available. What we saw on Apollo 13 wasn't the product of people trying to expand beyond the mission objectives with what is on hand, it was a last ditch effort to save the Apollo crew. They could afford to do unintended things with the equipment on hand since the only other option was to admit defeat then let people die. Even the very much fictional The Martian was based upon that premise. Treating it as a thought experiment: the primary response was to terminate the mission and evacuate. The part about the lone survivor on Mars was about ditching every mission objective in the name of survival. It would be very difficult to even create a fictional narrative of a human team going beyond the abilities of a similarly appointed robotic mission without abandoning reality altogether.

For the cost of sending one human there for a week, we could send thousands of robots there for years.

There is no way that human space exploration is ever cost effective with robot space exploration.

I’m no expert of course but I get the impression that we’re trying to run before we can walk. Many more robotic missions and way more basic research done more scientifically first could quite plausibly get humans there quicker in the end. Reading A City on Mars I found myself thinking this is many orders of magnitude more complicated than Apollo and will take more time.

Can we realistically send humans to Mars plus the return trip? I would maybe believe we can do a one way trip and leave those astronauts to die after snapping some pictures.

sending a human there also contaminates the planet more, allowing us to learn less.

Mars 2020 has a microphone. You can probably find audio out there but here’s some:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mars-2020-perseverance/soun...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHenFGnixzU

And they scrapped the lunar gateway to piece out the ion thrusters to send to saturn for some reason

The moon is probably the only celestial body humans can actually occupy with current technology, for every other object in the solar system we need robots.