This is exactly how NASA should be spending their money. The entire Cassini / Huygens project cost less than $4B upfront and has been massively successful.
Completely agree. So were the Mars rovers (and for that matter most of NASA's robotic/probe missions since inception?).
Looking at NASA from the outside in, I wish they'd pivot completely to robotic exploration in space for the next few decades, and energy/propulsion research on earth. Send robotic missions to Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn, and use other robots to test new propulsion systems in space.
Use these exploratory missions to inform planning for eventual manned missions, especially to resource-rich destinations we might be able to mine and harvest to better fund them, all the while sending back brilliant (live?) video and images of other worlds (or the universe in cases like HST's Deep Field camera). Both the scientific and PR ROI of robotic exploration is very high.
Each time I inspect high resolution photos of planetary surfaces taken recently, I cross my fingers and look for something out of place like a city in ruins or a crashed ship.
