PC World interviewed the rover driver team about driving the mars rover in their top tech jobs section. I admit, it would be a pretty nice job to sit at your computer and explore Mars remotely with a rover. Unfortunately, it isn't quite that simple. The issue is the delay for transmissions. It takes the instructions between 4 and 20 minutes to travel the 36-250 million miles to Mars. Then another 4 to 20 minutes again to get back the response from the rover.
When it is night on Mars, the rover goes to sleep to conserve power. This is when the team does most of it's work. They analyze the data and photographs from the previous day and formulate a plan for the next Martian day. Then they plug their plan into a 3D simulator to check that it will work. Once the simulation for the next day's mission plan is fully functional, they send it up to the rover and go home for the day. Then they come back the next Martian night and go over data they just received and form another mission plan. "If something does go wrong, we're not going to know until the next day."
One rover driver says "It's like driving a broken grocery cart by remote control from 100 million miles away, so it has its challenges."
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