Comms and control; signal corruption and delay will increase as the distance increases.
For comms, that means either more transmission power from a spacecraft that is likely to have been travelling for years, if not decades. Bigger ground or space-based receivers. Or much, much more cost-effectively, reducing bandwidth by adding more bits in error correction. QED using ai to transmit only interesting information becomes attractive.
While for control, it takes between five to twenty minutes for a signal between Earth and Mars, and between Earth and Voyager 1, it's currently twenty-one hours. Adding better control and the ability to cope with more eventualities to a craft that will fly itself in poorly understood situations reduces the cost of trying to achieve a reasonable likelihood of mission success [0].
[0] The alternative being to send one - or more - simpler but still massively expensive craft to determine the missing data ahead of time (and hope it doesn't change).
For comms, that means either more transmission power from a spacecraft that is likely to have been travelling for years, if not decades. Bigger ground or space-based receivers. Or much, much more cost-effectively, reducing bandwidth by adding more bits in error correction. QED using ai to transmit only interesting information becomes attractive.
While for control, it takes between five to twenty minutes for a signal between Earth and Mars, and between Earth and Voyager 1, it's currently twenty-one hours. Adding better control and the ability to cope with more eventualities to a craft that will fly itself in poorly understood situations reduces the cost of trying to achieve a reasonable likelihood of mission success [0].
[0] The alternative being to send one - or more - simpler but still massively expensive craft to determine the missing data ahead of time (and hope it doesn't change).