What? No talk about the Mars Rover?

[David E. Gervais]

I was thinking, if they had a permanent satalite in orbit around mars, the future landers could save on payload by using it as a relay to send info back to earth. That way they wouldn't need such big bulky transmitters. The space could be used for more scientific equipment.

Just a thought, Cheers!

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Taz-in-Space:
I'll be interested seeing what kind of landing the next rover makes.
If sucessful, does anyone know how far apart they will be? Or how fast and far they can go?
Would be way cool to see them taking pictures of each other!

I was thinking it's a shame that one of them isn't close enough to the Beagle 2 to roll over and give it a kick and see if that doesn't get that one working.

[Captain Kwok]

Originally posted by David E. Gervais:
I was thinking, if they had a permanent satalite in orbit around mars, the future landers could save on payload by using it as a relay to send info back to earth. That way they wouldn't need such big bulky transmitters. The space could be used for more scientific equipment.

Just a thought, Cheers!

They're two satellites in permanent orbit of mars, they are the Global Surveyor and a weather satellite.

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by David E. Gervais:
I was thinking, if they had a permanent satalite in orbit around mars, the future landers could save on payload by using it as a relay to send info back to earth. That way they wouldn't need such big bulky transmitters. The space could be used for more scientific equipment.

Just a thought, Cheers!

There are several permanent orbitting sattelites areound Mars. I am not sure but I suspect they can relay Messages in a pinch. To do that for all the communications isn't that efficent I don't think though. It's easier for the rover to track in on the Earth far away then to track a sattelite whipping about in a close mars orbit. Especially since the orbiters useally go into a polar orbit to make coverage of the entire planet easier. Your windows of communication would be much smaller than with direct comm back to earth. The limiting factor in bandwith isn't the transmitting power as much as it is the line of sight window. Unless you put the mars orbitter in a geo-synch orbit, and then it's not much good for anything but relaying Messages, which is an aweful waste of resources.

With a big enough antenna on Earth you could probably pick up a transmitter on mars not much bigger then a cell phone.

Geoschmo
I'm not a sattelite communications expert, but I play one on tv...

[ January 09, 2004, 11:57: Message edited by: geoschmo ]

[Ragnarok]

Originally posted by David E. Gervais:
I was thinking, if they had a permanent satalite in orbit around mars, the future landers could save on payload by using it as a relay to send info back to earth. That way they wouldn't need such big bulky transmitters. The space could be used for more scientific equipment.

Just a thought, Cheers!

I thought they already had something like this? I was thinking that is why they could only try at certain times to communicate with the Beagle because they had to wait for the sat. to be in the right orbit to recieve the transmission from the surface. Maybe I was mistaken. Wouldn't be the first time, that's for sure.

[gregebowman]

Hot diggity damn!! We're finally getting a president that's talking about expanding the space program. Although i doubt if men will land on the moon again before Bush leaves office, let alone before I die, it's still good to hear something like this from a sitting president. I can't wait to see what happens.

[Baron Munchausen]

His father said something similar and nothing came of it. NASA estimated that getting to Mars would cost $400 Billion and suddenly everyone forgot about space programs. Rather than make some big, vague, grandiose statement of 'values' and 'idealism' we need a concrete and reachable goal. A genuinely reusable orbital vehicle would be a good, solid goal. The current shuttles are just experimental vehicles forced to serve as working shuttles. They are essentially disassembled and rebuilt after each flight. NOT cheap and not genuinely re-usable! We need that 'space plane' to actually get developed so that the cost of going into orbit can drop by 90 percent or so. From there it will be dramatically easier to get to Mars or anyplace else we want to go.

[ January 09, 2004, 22:26: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]