Is the majority of the reason for such a slow pace safety? I imagine when you are monitoring it's progress from another planet, you want it to inch along. I'm off to check them out now. I always appreciate the #space posts/commentary from you. Thanks.
It's for safety, it's also about energy. Solar panels on the older rovers don't generate much electricity considering the distance, and you need to keep plenty spare for communications, instruments, and reserve power. Curiosity has a thermal core for power, and doesn't rely on solar, but the same rules apply. That coupled with being safe and not breaking anything, you get really slow speeds. They generally give it small instruction sets at a time, like say, 25ft, and then make it go, then monitor, wait for it to stop, then send another instruction. As at every stop they want to examine the surroundings and then decide the new instruction sets. Plus with certain obstacles they'll even let the rover sit still for days while they practice with the on-earth-clone of the rover in the "mars sandbox" at JPL where they can play around with different techniques, say, in coming down a steep incline, or overly sandy looking hill that could cause problems or get the rover stuck. It's a really slow process.
Great comment, thank you. I had never considered that they were physically replicating the situations here at JPL.