I ' ve never seen this bot before , it ' s my new favorite lol <| sep |> tbh , there ' s no signficant difference between engineering a rover and engineering your phone , except your phone has a lot of engineering to allow it to be made by the millions . And everyone working on space goods wishes they could use phone parts . Smaller , lighter , much lower power consumption , much higher capability . Management , though , perceives a much higher risk than there is . Losing something in space is expensive . But just ask Samsung how much a lack of slack in the battery compartment is costing it we could get a human to Mars for the $ 14 B they wrote off on the Note 7 . Space programs used to create things that were infinitely better technology than massmarket programs did now it ' s the other way around by a ton , and the space programs need to get more flexible about using things and more agile about qualifying them for the mission . As for bandwidth , any Nmegapixel image can be converted to an N 4 megapixel image as it ' s being transmitted . You just make the loop iterator 4 instead of 1 . Zero operational cost . Zero . So you still get your lowres establishing shots and you get superhigh res hero shots . By far the biggest cost on a mission like this is to sit there wishing you could have more detailed data and merely have to wait a few more cycles for it to finish downloading .