In his message to future Mars explorers

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/08/08/carl-sagan-message-to-mars/

he anticipated a time when waking across this kind of broken, not too otherworldly terrain would become ordinary. For now, Opportunity and its sister vehicles are our avatars on this distant world, our eyes, ears, and (most recently) our touch as we probe into its interior), but will this always be so?

For the first time in almost fifty years, people feel that something is again stirring; something that seemed to have died at the end of the Apollo missions as NASA turned inward, succumbed to the bureaucratic imperative, and seemingly lost its way. After half a century of missed opportunities and false starts, a few visionaries seem to have recovered an image of Mars as an inhabitable world — a place, if you will, between the ghosts of Ray Bradbury’s imagined ancient civilization and the “dead, desiccated” world of the early instrumented flybys. A real PLACE — as in the Opportunity image — to be visited, walked on, and lived in.