Look, to a certain extent I’m playing the devils advocate here. I’m not here to pester you guys, but dang folks. You want to know if there’s water on Ceres. We haven’t been back to the moon in decades, but water on Ceres is a top priority. That is just senseless to me.
Pick a planet, any planet and let’s find out what we need to go there and do it. As we branch out, THEN we need to know about Ceres, not now.
What is NASAs budget each year. What does that amount to over 35 years? Where’s the beef?
Where’s the beef?
Cheaper to find out if there’s really anything worth going out there for with these (relatively) inexpensive probes. No sense funding a 100 billion dollar manned mission to Mars if there’s nothing there worth studying. Now, if one of those probes detects life? Then 100 billion would be cheap to go check it out.