Mars Needs Broadband

Mars Needs Broadband!

A new relay satellite will boost the data flow from Mars starting in the early 2020s.

Tony Reichhardt | July 19, 2016

NASA’s robotic Mars explorers are wonderful machines, but they’re only as good as their data links. All that photo-taking, drilling, and chemical analysis is pointless unless the information gets beamed back to scientists on Earth. Ask the people on the New Horizons mission, who’ve been waiting more than a year to get all their data from Pluto, which is still trickling in at dial-up speeds.
The space agency has grand plans for the next 20 years of Mars exploration, both human and robotic, and either scenario—whether it’s an astronaut expedition or a fleet of telepresence robots—requires high data rates to reach its full potential.

"A little help, please? The 15-year-old Mars Odyssey has been a good data relay, but it’s yesterday’s technology." Source: http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/mars-needs-broadband-180959830/?no-ist

[Click to Enlarge] InterPlaNetary Internet. Source: http://www2.ece.gatech.edu/research/labs/bwn/deepspace/

<more at http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/mars-needs-broadband-180959830/?no-ist; related articles and links: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/19/another_day_another_billionaire_another_space_internet_plan/ (Mars Needs Broadband, insists Elon Musk. Presumably a slight latency problem for red planet users. January 19, 2015) and http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/08/sending-messages-mars (Interplanetary broadband. August 22, 2012)>