After Decades, NASA May Finally Replace Mars Relays

We’ve yet to find any definitive evidence that there’s biological life on present-day Mars, but to say it’s a dead planet isn’t exactly accurate. Since the first Viking lander touched …. After Decades, NASA May Finally Replace Mars Relays.

Since the first Viking lander touched down in 1976, a revolving cast of humanity’s robotic envoys have worked on and around the Red Planet — and as access to space becomes cheaper and more routine, the mechatronic population of Mars will continue to grow. Given the number of landers, rovers, and orbiting spacecraft that have been sent to study Mars over the last 50 years, you might be surprised to find that the communications systems in place to transmit all that critical scientific data back to Earth aren’t nearly as solid as you’d think. While it’s understandable that the first craft to arrive at Mars had to operate in isolation, even the flagship Perseverance and Curiosity rovers carry their own high-gain radio systems so they can communicate directly with Earth.

Given the incredible premium put on the mass of an interplanetary craft, each mission that needs to bring along its own link back to Earth effectively reduces its payload of much scientific equipment. It’s not that satellites in orbit around the planet aren’t used to relay signals between Martian ground assets and their controllers back on Earth. In fact these relay links are used extensively for bandwidth-intensive tasks such as image transfers.

But it’s also true that the craft currently available to act as intermediaries between the two planets aren’t terribly well suited to the task.