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Mars to Earth at an average of 29 kbits/s

mars.jpl.nasa.gov

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Re: Mars to Earth at an average of 29 kbits/s

#11

Post by Achshar »

ryusage wrote: post #2

It's awesome that they've been involving the public so much in the details of how the rover mission really works. I'd actually been wondering about this exact question, since it seems to be one of the limiting factors for the quality of images and such. From a physics standpoint, sending data is clearly a lot more complicated than I'd previously assumed.

> It's awesome that they've been involving the public so much in the details of how the rover mission really works.

It must be mission critical to spread awareness since their budget cuts are getting worse and one way to correct that is to get people excited about space exploration. They now put a considerable effort in PR, involving people in the mission, sharing most of the information and making professional videos. And i believe this is why we see twitter accounts of most astronomers, satellites, rovers and other NASA properties. The NASA's ustream has been very popular lately and they have presence on every major social network. And curiosity was named after an essay written by a student in a competition organised by NASA for school students.

Re: Mars to Earth at an average of 29 kbits/s

#13

Post by danielweber »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #9
zhoutong wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it's possible to launch an orbiter in Mars synchronous orbit. That'll eliminate the bottleneck.

Wouldn't just a higher orbit achieve the same thing? You'd be in sight for longer periods, right? Without locking you into a location the way synchronous would. The current orbiters are primarily for imaging, so it makes sense that they're as low as possible. If you were always going to have several surface missions, it might make sense to have higher orbiters primarily tasked with communication relay.

As someone explained to me on another thread, the orbiters they have now are in polar orbits. A more equatorial orbit would create very frequent uplinks.

One thing is that they didn't know Gale Crater was where they were going to land until pretty soon before launch. There were a number of other sites. And if they chose one further from the equator, that satellite wouldn't necessarily be in the right place.

Re: Mars to Earth at an average of 29 kbits/s

#16

Post by hrayr »

Achshar wrote: post #11
ryusage wrote: post #2

It's awesome that they've been involving the public so much in the details of how the rover mission really works. I'd actually been wondering about this exact question, since it seems to be one of the limiting factors for the quality of images and such. From a physics standpoint, sending data is clearly a lot more complicated than I'd previously assumed.

> It's awesome that they've been involving the public so much in the details of how the rover mission really works. It must be mission critical to spread awareness since their budget cuts are getting worse and one way to correct that is to get people excited about space exploration. They now put a considerable effort in PR, involving people in the mission, sharing most of the information and making professional video…

"And curiosity was named after an essay written by a student in a competition organised by NASA for school students."

Nasa has been doing this for some time now, Sojourner[1], and MERs (Spirit & Opportunity) have also been named by student competitions.

[1] http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/MPF/rover/name.html

Re: Mars to Earth at an average of 29 kbits/s

#20

Post by rwhitman »

I read this the other day and found it interesting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet

Apparently NASA had plans for launching an orbiter specifically as an optical communications hub for Mars but scrapped it in 2005:

"As of 2005, NASA has canceled plans to launch the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter in September 2009; it had the goal of supporting future missions to Mars and would have functioned as a possible first definitive Internet hub around another planetary body. It would use optical communications using laser beams for their lower ping rates than radiowaves."

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