Developing relay links that increase the amount of data we get back from Mars. Those links will allow us to have small landers on the surface of the planet that can relay their data back through an orbiter and get that information to Earth. We'd also like to extend the Earth's Internet to include other planets. After Mars, the next planet we'll probably attempt to connect to is Jupiter and its moon Europa, which has signs of a liquid ocean underneath the frozen ice cap. One of the things that has driven the search for life on Mars and our understanding about life on Earth is that, where there is water, there is life.
Nothing is a long shot.
It's just a question of how fast things will happen. One thing that really excites me is the idea of a stationary spacecraft that would hover above a lander just like an Earth geostationary satellite. That opens the door to being continuously connected with the landers on the surface at very high data rates. I don't know whether we'll get there this decade, but it's a capability that would increase by three orders of magnitude our data return relative to Pathfinder, which would change everything about the way we interact with those spacecrafts. Our current strategy is an evolutionary one, where we work to understand the communications needs of our future missions and the technological capabilities that can be brought to bear in meeting them, and then devise a cost-effective strategy for deploying those capabilities.