Visiting old probes?

[bigdad84]

Because in trying to land a rover near an Apollo landing site there is always going to be some chance of things going wrong and the team losing control over the lander and it crashing into Apollo relics. Some of the Apollo relics like the retro reflectors are pretty useful and people still use them today to measure distance between Earth and the moon. If one of them or worse Tranquillity Base is destroyed by a out of control lander people are going to be pissed.

My thoughts were that they could land 5 miles or less away. Far enough that they know the engines will not disturb the original Apollo landing sites. And in turn just have the rover traverse the couple of miles towards the lander. Maybe in doing this, it would get the publics attention focused on space a little more.

[Nikolai]

I think there's a point where scientific curiosity decides "We know enough about this no longer completely alien location already that is not worth spending a lot of money to go back to it again when with the same money we could go to a truly alien location where we could learn a whole lot more".

Oh, sure. Point being, though, that there's always much more to learn about a location than what we learn through probe data; there are a lot of questions we still have about what we found at the Apollo landing sites, for that matter.

In other words, given how much there is to find out, it just seemed a little weird to phrase the opportunity cost in terms of the probe getting "enough" information (in the post I was replying to).

[lyndonguitar]

If would be awesome if somehow in the future we would be master navigators on space, and we can intercept the voyager probes any time we wish(but not interfere with its movement) and watch it as a sort of "moving museum art"