Things that don’t seem to make sense about our Mars exploration strategy

We have been warned that some areas are off limits.

You've been listening to too much Bill Nye the mechanical engineer guy

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We have been warned that some areas are off limits.

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Who texted us that?

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The monolith.

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There is frozen water ice at the poles. Why aren’t we exploring there instead of trying to figure out if water existed elsewhere?

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We don't typically send rovers to the poles of Mars for the same reason we don't send many people to the poles of Earth. It's fricking cold all the time, it's night for about 20% of the year, and it takes an astronomical effort and amount of cash just to survive. Mars tilts about the same as Earth, so its seasons roughly take up the same percentage of its year (orbital eccentricity changes this a bit, but we'll ignore that for now). So, its poles will be "nighttime" dark (as opposed to "twilight" dark) about 20% of the year, but a year on Mars is about 2 Earth years long, so we're talking many Earth months of extreme cold and darkness. Solar panels don't work well at night and batteries don't work well at -195F. Radioisotope thermal generators could be used to power a rover during a polar night, but they're relatively heavy for a rover and our supply of plutonium for them is limited, so we tend to reserve them for space probes that are going out to Jupiter and beyond on multi-year missions where sunlight is not strong enough to power them.

That said, we DID send a lander to Mars' South polar region (not the POLE itself). Mars Polar Lander was was supposed to land during the part of the year where it's light all the time and conditions aren't as harsh so it could finish its science before it died the following polar night. However, the claim is that someone had a giant "OOPSIE" and forgot to carry a one or something and instead of touching down lightly, the lander slammed into the Martian ice cap at about 50 miles an hour.

I think it was shot down. You know, that whole "off-limits" thing.

2010: Odyssey Two

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Who texted us that?

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Dave Bowman (or whatever he became) via HAL.