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Why Mars Is Not the Best Place To Look For Life
EccentricAnomaly writes "A story over at Science News quotes Alan Stern (former head of NASA Science missions) as saying: 'The three strongest candidates [for extraterrestrial life] are all in the outer solar system.' He's referring to Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. So why is NASA spending $2.5B on the next Mars Rover and planning to spend over $6B more on a Mars sample return when it can't find the money for much cheaper missions to Europa or Enceladus?"
Mars is closer and easier to send people to
Certainly it would be easier getting humans there than the outer solar system places.
...in fact, it's cold as hell.
is on Europa. I hope I live long enough to see whether I lose that bet.
Mars is closer to us than Europa, Titan, and Enceladus. Not just physically, but culturally. Literature, film, etc, Mars has played a big role in the past 50-75 years. If you hear "little green men", the average person is going to immediately think "Mars". More people are more likely to know the name Mars as opposed to some moons orbiting Saturn ( and yes, I'll admit I had to look in the article to double check that they are in fact moons of Saturn). If you are trying to get funding for something, you go for something people will recognize, because they will be more likely to support it. Ask for something they've never heard of, and they might start wondering if it's really all that necessary. It's sad, but it's true.
Also, people might confuse Europa with a continent, and Enceladus with a Mexican dish. :)
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
While missions to Europa and Enceladus may be cheaper they won't actually search for life. Instead they will stick a spacecraft in orbit around the moon and map the surface. At best, they may send a small probe to the surface that will survive a few hours in one location. On the other hand, a sample-return mission to Mars will generate knowledge and experience with a quicker turnaround and lower price than a similar mission to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn.
Mars is where the little green men are from! The other planets and moons are obviously uninhabited.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
The invaders came from Mars in "War of the Worlds", written in 1898, and people have been fixated on it ever since.
Don't expect either the U.S. military or NASA to update their plans for invasion based on almost 115 years of scientific research.
Seriously, the plan was to go to Mars since JFK's time, because he thought the Russians might beat us to the moon. NASA never updated the roadmap.
to want to investigate their neighborhood, and in our case that would be earth's moon, Mars, and Venus. Let's check it out.
The cruise trips to the faraway locales can wait.
The fact that Mars as no global magnetic field, and any carbon based life would in theory die within a short period of time because of the solar radiation. I do think we are gasping for straws thinking of having a colony on the planet.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Easier to get there but it would be impossible for humans to live on Mars.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Mars needs women.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
I'm just not sure what the point of that would be. Terraforming makes nice sci-fi, but isn't sustainable without incredible amounts of resources (let alone getting it started). If we want a 'launch-pad' outside of Earth's gravity, the moon would make a much better place. If we're just looking for evidence to put towards the origins of life debate, the moon is going to give us much more evidence of early earth-life. There isn't likely to be any life on Mars (other than earth-life remnants blown into space that might have landed there), as under the evolutionary paradigm, the conditions aren't right and any place where they might have been, were incredibly brief.
... then there will be life on it. Problem solved.
Is someone over at NASA finally being honest? Let's face it the odds on other life being discovered in our solarsystem is virtually zero. It is extremely extremely extremely unlikely.
But NASA is always wetting our appetites with the "possibility" of life. Why?
Funding.
Would US taxpayers be happy about funding extraterrestrial geologists to study rocks for the sake of studying rocks?
Face it, the most boring person at a party is a geologist. Most people don't care about rocks.
...to terraform, to transport human payloads to AND to live on. Worst case scenario it makes a good outpost / transfer terminal to the life-bearing moons further out.
We could learn a lot from exploring the planet closest to us, before venturing out to other places.
did you forget to take your meds?
Mars is a desert where humans cannot live. Even if NASA found dinosaur bones in the dirt on Mars, or whatever other proof that there has been life on Mars millions of years ago, who will benefit from that other than a few scientists who will publish the discovery in Science? Mars is inhospitable for vertebrates, and even for plants. Maybe they hope to find oil there, but Earth has not run out of oil yet. Europa, Enceladus, and Titan, on the other hand, might harbor different very life forms, perhaps even some that Man could communicate with.
Yes. We should look around on the sun instead.
Yes, Europa has a probably has a better chance of having life in its subsurface oceans but there is that wee problem of penetrating through its icy crust. How the hell are you going to penetrate through 20 kilometers of ice (minimum estimate) without using a massive thermonuclear bomb? And then if you did, any life in the vicinity of the blast would be annihilated and then the thawed hole would freeze over before a probe could find anything. Yea, forget about Europa.
This seems unfair at multiple levels. First, we understand the basic Martian environment a lot better than other environments so sending things there are easier. Second we know from the Viking probes that Mars has weird chemistry going on in its surface. We still don't know what exactly happened there. The basic results of the Viking experiments seemed to be consistent with life but no complex carbon compounds were found. We now know that this may have been due to the presence of perchlorates in the surface material which could have destroyed the organic compounds when the samples were heated. Mars is still one of the most promising locations for life.
That said, there are less good reasons why Mars is a frequent target. Sending things to Mars takes a lot less time than sending things to the outer systems. That means if one is a scientist one would rather work on a project that sends something to Mars than something that goes far away. Second, Mars has a place in the popular mind that these various moons do not.
The real question that should be being asked is not why there's so much funding for Mars compared to other locations but why there's so little funding in general. The repeatedly canceled Europa missions would be in the cost range of a few hundred million dollars. This is a tiny amount when one compares it for example to how much money the US spends on Afghanistan monthly. The US has messed up priorities. That's why even as we speak, the Russians are doing a sample return mission to Phobos which will launch in a few weeks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fobos-Grunt. If the Russians were still dirty commies the US would be in an absolute panic and we'd have congressional hearings asking why the US isn't doing something similar. I hope that as China becomes more of a boogeyman the US will start taking space seriously again, if not for the good of humanity, at least for old-fashioned xenophobia. And I suppose that in the long-run I really would prefer that functioning democracies explore and colonize space than other countries, but that's so far in the future at the current rate of exploration that it doesn't seem to be immediately relevant. Right now, we need to just get some people substantially interested in exploring beyond our little rock.
We could probably afford it if we strip the top 1% wealth from their assets.
You do realize if you try that, you simply change the names of the 1% as they take over the transfer...
There will always be people with more than others. Leave people who have earned what they have alone to keep it and keep producing more, like water the money is recycled eventually in ways that benefit us all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How so? Mars is red because of Iron Oxide. Oxide = Oxygen. Mars is similar to earth in basic composition. Just need a way to extract oxygen from rust reliably and efficiently and I see no reason that it would be impossible. Plants can also be genetically engineered to behave differently or to tolerate certain environments better. There is no reason at all to say that this is impossible. Improbable, maybe. Impossible...not at all.
.. would the tea party support a NASA budget that wants to spend money for going to Europe.
All these worlds are yours, except Europa.
Attempt no landing there
Use them together
Use them in peace
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
Nahhh. I'm pretty sure there is a Wal~Mart there.
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
Now get off my lawn
All of a sudden I want to go out and buy a Passat. At least I don't have to make the obligatory Rocket Man post.
I imagine bio-engineering would be the direction to take to avoid that. If scientists can design a self-replicating micro-organism to extract oxygen from the soil and release it (and then die without leaving something toxic behind), it may be possible to make Mars easier for humans to live on. Yes it's a big "if", but it's an area scientists are making a lot of progress in, so I wouldn't discount it completely.
However, I'd be more worried about this:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast31jan_1/
If that's true, you'd be fighting a losing battle no matter what you do.
is, why Venus seems like a tabu for exploration and research?
There you are, staring at me again.
other than just looking for life. Also, Mars probes can operate for years not just for hours like the one on Titan.
All these worlds are yours now except Europa. Make no attempt to land there.
That's why.
and it's chock full of cheap plastic (organic) crap, it doesn't mean there's anything even remotely similar to life to be found there.
And who ever said that space exploration had to focused exclusively on finding extraterrestrial life? Mars holds untapped potential for investment! Once we're there and we've laid claim to it, we can start divvying it up and selling it off. The real estate market could real use shot in the arm (or the head).
A Wal-Mart, you mean the Chinese got to Mars?
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Then all we would have to do is figure out how to create a molten iron core in the planet and give said core rotational motion. Geez, it's just that easy..
Of course we could always burrow underground and contain ourselves within the artificial environment we create there. But if we are going to do that, we are better ff staying out of a gravity well.
NASA isn't there to find extraterrestrial life, it's there to get funds to do exploration. On that basis, do you think it will be easier for them to finance a mission to Mars or one to some distant rock that nobody outside the scientific community has heard about, cares about or could find on a map?
If they fail to find life on Mars (despite the David Bowie song), they can recover by saying "we haven't failed, we just haven't succeeded YET". However if they "waste" billions on a mission to one of the more likely, but unpronounceable candidates, then "the public" will start asking questions about why they were looking there, when everybody knows Mars is a better bet.
NASA's main goal is to secure its own future. It won't achieve that by trying to spend money on unpopular things that taxpayers aren't prepared to fund.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
> would be impossible for humans to live on Mars
Who cares? This is all about "the first post" thing, the first human who sets his foot on Mars wins, period.
We'll just end up spraying Roundup(TM) on it,shooting, weed-wacking or declaring war on it. YES WE CAN!
A Wal-Mart, you mean the Chinese got to Mars?
Yeah, where else do you expect the red chinese to be?
He can be president of Mars. I'm sure it would be perfectly constitutional
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
We're not looking to discover what early Earth life looked like; we have Earth for that. What we're looking for is life that evolved in a completely isolated environment. Life on earth pretty much all uses DNA and RNA - it was the "fittest" self-replicating pattern, and it's pretty much got a monopoly on Earth. But if we can find life out there that hasn't had to compete with any of the lifeforms on earth, and didn't evolve from any life forms on earth, that would be incredibly interesting. We'd get to see if our set of amino acids were just the solution that life on earth stumbled upon, or if they're so head-and-shoulders above the competition that they will form wherever they can form.
I can't figure out what you mean by "the conditions aren't right under the evolutionary paradigm." Honestly, the sentence parses as gibberish. The basic ideas behind evolution don't even require organic matter. As Dawkins points out in "The Blind Watchmaker," any pattern that is predisposed to create copies of itself will show up in an environment more often than a pattern which is not. If the copying process has the potential to introduce random transcription errors, the it has all it needs to perform a search of the local pattern-space for "best pattern at copying itself." And, with scarce resources, there is an external pressure for these self-replicating patterns to be best at self-replicating. Nothing in here demands a perfectly earth-like environment. Water certainly helps, because all sorts of interesting chemical reactions occur at an impressive rate in aqueous solutions, but if we're looking for life outside of Earth, we need to be prepared to look for life not-quite-as-we-know-it.
NASA has no real scientific focus. It's just all over the place. If I were in charge, I would give it one primary mission, and a secondary mission, and then have a tertiary agenda.
Agendas:
1. Detection and defense of incoming bodies, including the development of better D&D technology. Eventually this will be fulfilled and go into maintenance mode, where Agenda 2 then gets primary funding.
2. Find life using existing technology including the development of better D&D technology. While this will never be complete (once we find it we can keep on finding it) we will look for more and more sophisticated forms. (I assume extraterrestrial bacterial detection would happen first, then complex organisms)
3. All other efforts on determining the nature of the universe. JWST, Hubble, etc.
As far as I am concerned NASA has no reason to send humans off planet. We should be developing Avatar-like technology for near earth operations and AI driven tech for stuff where the lag is too long.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
The sooner education becomes a priority, assuming we can help people avoid starvation, the sooner we will care more about pursuing R&D that leads to other planets. Currently, we are stuck pursuing the fantasies of old sci-fi comics, which focused on Mars and influenced the baby-boomer generation, which is currently controlling the bulk of economic capital. Education can help us move beyond this stagnation.
Just take samples from the areas on the surface where water is welling up from underneath and refreezing.
which are taboo. So they pretend to themselves it's from recent water .. which might mean life, if it made sense, which it does not.
Just try looking a bit harder. You may wish to check out the leads at http://www.marsanomalyresearch.com/index.htm
Then again, would you really want to find life there and open that bag of worms?
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
In fact, it's cold as hell.
For context, click Parent.
Seriously, if we're going to consider best places to search for life, then Earth probably has to be on the top of the list. It's the closest planet to us and very easy for us to study, it's solidly in the temperature zone necessary for water-based life and even has liquid water oceans on its surface, and finally, we already know there's life there and what it looks like. So if we're going to look for life based solely on which place has the best chances of finding it, then we need not look past Earth.
To do my best work, I prefer my Asus laptop, a fine cognac, and your mom's bed. Then a morning alone in my home office with a real keyboard in a supportive chair. Happiness=productivity, so she should be even more productive than my amazing
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
But if we are going to do that, we are better [off] staying out of a gravity well.
Agree. We ought to be mining the asteroid belt, building vast tin cans filled with habitable environments, spinning to provide gravity.
I'm sure that'd be a lot simpler than terraforming, though there'd still be a lot of things to work out, such as shielding from cosmic rays, holding in enough atmosphere at Earth air pressure (it'd be a bomb out there, after all), and any number of "what if"s that the engineers/planners fail to anticipate. "What, there's no calcium to be found in the Asteroid Belt?!?"
Still better than holding all our eggs in one bucket (Earth) as we are now. Considering Earth's history, we ought to be taking Extinction Level Events more seriously. This ought to be humanity's main priority.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Really - the Moon landings were also a political stunt and nothing more. The uppity-ups are not interested in science. Just in trophies. Titan, Europa and other moons of the outer planets are just too unknown by the average Leno Jay-Walking crowd who can barely tell you who the first president was but can tell you every word Snookie spouts out on a given episode. Mars, tho, is a viable trophy because even with the intelligence drain that is sucking the brains out of the average public citizen while they bake their buns in front of reruns of Jersey Shore or are rabidly following the antics of the Kardashians inbetween tweeting about every bowel movement, everyone knows about Mars. The Moon is so 39 years ago. Mars is the current fad. If future missions don't end in catastrophe, it too will be mostly forgotten as the Apollo missions have (except for Apollo 13 since most of what the average couch-potato knows of that came from the movie).
Mars may be fairly dry, but it clearly has liquid water, some organics, and reasonably high temperatures.
I don't see why this needs to be an either/or scenario. If we stop wasting money on sending people into orbit, we can send a fleet of advanced robotic probes to all of these destinations.
There were life on the planets those moons orbit..?!
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
Life on Mars = either "a TV show" or "stick to what they know"
as opposed to
Life at other places = "never heard of these places - stick with Mars"
No way. Complete human extinction events are so incredibly unlikely that we should not be spending insane amounts of resources to prevent that.
Also, even if we tried, the effort would be wasted anyway. Suppose this extinction event would happen 100,000 years from now. What is the chance that anything we build or do right now will survive the next 100,000 years ? It's practically zero.
OK, so the problem is lack of a magnetic field. Well, we know how to create magnetic fields. Just put a big coil around Mars' equator and send a big current through it. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
...in fact, it's cold as hell.
So hell has finally frozen?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
What the first poster said:
Mars is closer and easier to send people to
and the fact that people (including scientists), that have a very publicized name/image, have a real issue scrapping programs once the following simple pattern occurs:
- something looked really good, project planned
- money was allocated, stuff was built
- project accomplished phase 1
- additional phases planned
- project proven to be less valuable than newly planned alternatives
Very few can say, "Fascinating. I guess this project is no longer as important as the other one(s)."
Most say, "Mine is still the best idea, and I can prove to you why. Just give me some more money and time. Stop being distracted and let's get back on task here."
Quickly summarized version, but I think anyone who can read gets the drift.
If you believe youtube, NASA did blur stuff on the moon to hide the presence and/or remnants of aliens or their stuff.
Considering Earth's history, we ought to be taking Extinction Level Events more seriously. This ought to be humanity's main priority
No way. Complete human extinction events are so incredibly unlikely that we should not be spending insane amounts of resources to prevent that.
Earth's already gone through, what, five of them, and now we're capable of producing our own via the numerous nuclear arsenals out there, not to mention people fiddling with bio-weaponry. Considering how smart people and politicians are, do you really want to leave this to the last? The downside is way bigger than the cost.
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
That's about one per billion years, and the solar system now has fewer big rocks wandering around. Also, humans have a better chance of surviving an impact than dinosaurs, at least some humans. We can build shelters, for instance, and keep food in storage for a long time. We're also much smaller, so we don't need so much food, and we're much more adaptable and creative.
And if you don't trust people with our nuclear/biological weaponry, why would you trust them to keep a colony running on another planet ? They'll fuck that up too.
I worked at JPL and on MSL (the mission that grew to 2.5 billion). I also worked on some internal R&D for some systems that *might* end up on a Europa mission.
Europa and other bodies around Jupiter have to deal with an intense radiation environment. It'll take many years to get there, but the actual mission life will be short. I think once we did orbits around Jupiter you would orbit Europa. Orbiting Europa repeatedly puts the spacecraft through radiation hell and I think the electronics would die within like 45 days? Also, no FPGAs exist that can take the total integrated dose to last long enough to get some science done, so almost all of the electronics would need to be ASICs. Probably on the order of 30 new ASICs for all the control avionics and science instruments. That's a huge undertaking and is not cheap to do.
Just a short list, but these are some of the complications in going to Europa and why it's not a cheapy mission ($300 M). Maybe, *maybe* you could do it for a billion? But hey, MSL was bid I think at $0.8 billion and look what it grew to. These undertakings are huge, and sometimes it's a situation of not knowing what you don't know which quickly increases cost when the scope is finally realized (or glimpsed).
I used to work at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, worked on MSL (the Mars rover mission that's grown to $2.5B), and did some R&D on a system that *could* end up on a Europa mission. The entire Jovian system is a radiation nightmare. If I remember correctly, it'll take years for the spacecraft to get there, we can orbit Jupiter relatively safely, but as soon as we orbit Europa or Ganymede, mission life is like another 45 days? The electronics will simply die of overdoses of radiation. Also, currently no FPGAs, can survive this radiation environment long enough to get any science done. Yes, there are *some* rad-hard FPGAs, but, again, they cannot take the total integrated dose (TID) of radiation that the Jovian environment is going to dish out in a short about of time. This means, the spacecraft would need about 30 ASICs between control avionics and instrument packages. That is no small (nor cheap) undertaking. I don't know what they mean by "cheap" missions. I think of earth orbit sats for like $300M, but you're not going to Jupiter for less than $1B. But even then, I think MSL was originally bid at $0.8B and look what happened. These systems are ridiculously complex and sometimes it's a situation of not knowing what you don't know. When you finally get a glimpse of what's really going on, well costs go up... a lot. Also, NASA doesn't just say, "hey let's go here". It's all about the science and you need scientists that want to study something there. The most recent decadal survey (http://www.universetoday.com/83813/where-to-next-decadal-survey-prioritizes-future-planetary-missions/) showed more scientists interested in Mars and what-not compared to outer planet missions.
Since when has the search for extraterrestrial life been part of NASA's mandate? And why must the search for life be the sole reason for NASA to launch a scientific mission?
Consider http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.html
Here are NASA's objectives according to the National Aeronautics and Space Act:
"(1) The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.
(2) The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles.
(3) The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies, and living organisms through space.
(4) The establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes.
(5) The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere.
(6) The making available to agencies directly concerned with national defense of discoveries that have military value or significance, and the furnishing by such agencies, to the civilian agency established to direct and control nonmilitary aeronautical and space activities, of information as to discoveries which have value or significance to that agency.
(7) Cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations in work done pursuant to this chapter and in the peaceful application of the results thereof.
(8) The most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities, and equipment.
(9) The preservation of the United States preeminent position in aeronautics and space through research and technology development related to associated manufacturing processes."
This is another example of Program Suicide, which has been responsible for so many Big Projects programs being killed. When the budget gets tight, the leaders of different sections of the program start fighting for resources. They start campaigning for allies outside the program, who in turn use the in-fighting to as an excuse to have the program cut. In this case, NASA as a whole is committing suicide. Manned vs. Robotic programs, Inner planets vs. Outer planets, missions vs. research. Add to this the groups pushing commercial space vs. NASA, and the whole U.S. space program is killing itself. There are a lot of groups that want NASA's money and the space community is helping those groups to get it. If we kill the space program this way, we deserve the consequences!
Thanks. This the subject nobody's talking about. Our priorities are so fucked up. Why are we talking about going to Mars vs. Europa? We need to do all of it! And instead we're pissing away orders of magnitude more money on smart bombs and cruise missiles and replacement limbs for brave kids. WTF?
Getting funding to explore Uranus is a lot Harder.
Has had an axe to grind with the Mars program for a long time. Nothing new to see here. He's probably also bitter ever since the IAU demoted the planet his baby is headed to a "dwarf planet."
Full disclosure: when he was the science director at NASA, he threatened funding changes that would've put me out of a job, so he's not my favorite person in the world, so take the appropriate amounts of salt with MY comments.
With all that said, I agree with him to an extent. I would *love* to see more attention to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. But the anti-science, cut the budget at all costs people are ascendant right now, and their opposition is pretty luke-warm at best to the space program. The Mars program has momentum and the chances of us getting all the cool stuff funded is virtually nil. I doubt the sample return mission he's talking about will even get funded, especially in light of a recent OMB releases. For missions to Jupiter and Saturn to get any congressional love right now is not likely.
We've been warned! Make no landings on Europa!
Everyone who cares, knows what Mars is. Most people do not know who, where, or WTF Europa, Titan, and Enceladus are. When a big part of the mission would be public appeal, that does count.
So why is NASA spending $2.5B on the next Mars Rover and planning to spend over $6B more on a Mars sample return when it can't find the money for much cheaper missions to Europa or Enceladus?"
This summary doesn't accurately describe the situation at all. The Mars missions are so more expensive largely because they are doing more. The next Mars Rover is going to be larger, heavier, and more capable than the two previous--wildly successful--rovers in pretty much every way. That $6B mission is a sample return mission, lifting off and bringing a research payload from Mars back to Earth is an enormous technical challenge. It's never been done before and that will drive most of the cost.
Also the linked missions aren't quite as cheap as the summary implies. The proposed mission to Europa has an estimated cost of $2.5 billion (and $4.7 billion is the given estimate in the last paragraph of the first link in the summary), exactly the same price as the first "overly expensive" Mars mission mentioned. The Enceladus trip is much cheaper, estimated at a little over half of a billion, so that at least is a reasonable alternative, though I still want to point out that that mission is much earlier in the planning stages, and missions that diverge a lot from previous missions are more likely to have ballooning costs as new found kinks are worked out.
Another issue is that not only are the Mars missions promising more, but there is a much greater chance that they will be able to live up to those promises. Every single Mars mission we've done so far has added to our body of knowledge on the planet, and our ability to better plan a mission and engineer a craft that can get more and better data on the next run. From Viking and on we have answered many, many questions about Mars, and learned about even more questions (meaning that we know the sort of doodad that needs to be on the next mission to answer that new question). Starting a new series of missions to a new celestial body means that in a lot of ways you have to start back at the drawing board again. This is another reason to start small on a new body, better to have 3-4 partially successful $200 million missions leading up to that big $2.5 billion dollar rover mission rather than trying plan a $2.5 billion mission right of the bat.
I should clarify that I don't think that investigating these moons is a bad idea. I think it's a wonderful one. However I don't think that we should investigate these moons in place of Mars, when we have already accumulated so much experience on how to investigate Mars. It's also worthwhile to note that this was the viewpoint of every scientist interviewed in the article. Nobody said that they didn't want to go to Mars, they all said that they wanted this moons visited in addition to Mars, not instead of.