AI Software Topic - Three Weeks of Study On a Fully Autonomous Robotic Asteroid Mission?

At a recent NASA seminar in Washington DC for Near Earth Objects or
NEOs the participants in the breakaway session discussed a manned
mission to an asteroid which would last about three weeks. No, not
three weeks total, it could take up to 10 months to rendezvous with
the asteroid in the first place, but then they could be on the
asteroid itself for three weeks doing their research, and then
jettisoning off the asteroid into the proper trajectory to rendezvous
back with Earth.It was reasoned that humans can do so many things
better than artificially intelligent robotic systems presently, so it
makes sense to send humans rather than robots. Today, I might agree
with those comments, but in 20 years I certainly wouldn't, and I would
suspect that it would be much smarter and more cost effective to send
robots which did not require life-support systems. You see, whereas,
human beings can make better decisions perhaps on the fly without the
relay satellite delay for communications, they also require a lot more
systems in the spacecraft.More systems require more weight, not to
mention water, oxygen tanks, and other things. Imagine how much food
two or three astronauts might eat in 10 months in space, and on the
return trip? That's a lot of weight to send up through the Earth's
atmosphere to get out of this gravity well. Indeed, after watching the
Mars Rover perform all its duties for months on end, it would seem to
me that human scientists are almost ready to send fully autonomous
robotics to asteroids for research.Some would say it's almost
impossible to rendezvous with a spinning asteroid, but I don't see
that it would be much different than a fighter pilot flying in
formation like the blue Angels, or docking for fuel during aerial
refueling maneuvers. And guess what? We have autonomous systems which
can do both of those things right now. Therefore I don't think it's
out of the question to consider sending robots to do experiments on
actual asteroids. Please consider all this.