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I believe it is much cheaper to put something in LEO then it is to get it to Mars, so I don't know if the economics of Mars Missions have fundamentally shifted

by enkid 5y ago

I believe it is much cheaper to put something in LEO then it is to get it to Mars, so I don't know if the economics of Mars Missions have fundamentally shifted to cheaper probes the way they have for satellites.

XorNot 5y ago
I suspect we're limited more by communications capability then anything else: pretty much a hand-held radio will reach up to LEO if someone's listening (short-wave definitely does and that's off-the-shelf at consumer prices pretty much). Whereas Mars requires the Deep Space Network to reasonably be able to maintain communications - so your very cheap probes still need super-highgrade radios to be useful (the landers for example still generally pack an antenna that can reach all the way back to Earth even when they use uplinks - the helicopter is relaying via the lander). What we're missing on Mars is reliable communications for probes: there's no common backhaul to Earth that you can just hook into. But I'd be willing to bet that's coming: if Starlink works on Earth, there's no real reason it shouldn't work on Mars. At which point you can go with the "swarm of cheap hardware" idea because it can hand off the need for the power, hardware and logistics and backing to communicate inter-planetary.
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  > Whereas Mars requires the Deep Space Network to reasonably be able to maintain communications - so your very cheap probes still need super-highgrade radios to be useful That's not technically true. They maintain fancy radios that can reach Earth as a backup. Data transfer is done via the Mars Relay network. https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8861/the-mars-relay-network-connects-us-to-nasas-martian-explorers/ https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8861/the-mars-relay-network-conne... Ingenuity uses this as well. > if Starlink works on Earth, there's no real reason it shouldn't work on Mars. Ground-to-low orbit comms relays have been in operations for half a century. And decades at Mars already. Starlink is for high throughput communications from ground to ground on the same planet with always-on connectivity and global coverage. Their sattelites are engineered cheap and replenished with cheap lift from SpaceX. Totally different problem calculus at Mars and doesn't address "backhaul" to Earth. You'd need longer-lived high throughput optical terminals or better, preferably at Areostationary orbits. Checkout work by Briedenthal and Edwards on the matter.
- deleted 5y ago
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by enkid 5y ago

XorNot 5y ago

I suspect we're limited more by communications capability then anything else: pretty much a hand-held radio will reach up to LEO if someone's listening (short-wave definitely does and that's off-the-shelf at consumer prices pretty much). Whereas Mars requires the Deep Space Network to reasonably be able to maintain communications - so your very cheap probes still need super-highgrade radios to be useful (the landers for example still generally pack an antenna that can reach all the way back to Earth even when they use uplinks - the helicopter is relaying via the lander). What we're missing on Mars is reliable communications for probes: there's no common backhaul to Earth that you can just hook into. But I'd be willing to bet that's coming: if Starlink works on Earth, there's no real reason it shouldn't work on Mars. At which point you can go with the "swarm of cheap hardware" idea because it can hand off the need for the power, hardware and logistics and backing to communicate inter-planetary.

jvanderbot 5y ago
> Whereas Mars requires the Deep Space Network to reasonably be able to maintain communications - so your very cheap probes still need super-highgrade radios to be useful That's not technically true. They maintain fancy radios that can reach Earth as a backup. Data transfer is done via the Mars Relay network. https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8861/the-mars-relay-network-connects-us-to-nasas-martian-explorers/ https://mars.nasa.gov/news/8861/the-mars-relay-network-conne... Ingenuity uses this as well. > if Starlink works on Earth, there's no real reason it shouldn't work on Mars. Ground-to-low orbit comms relays have been in operations for half a century. And decades at Mars already. Starlink is for high throughput communications from ground to ground on the same planet with always-on connectivity and global coverage. Their sattelites are engineered cheap and replenished with cheap lift from SpaceX. Totally different problem calculus at Mars and doesn't address "backhaul" to Earth. You'd need longer-lived high throughput optical terminals or better, preferably at Areostationary orbits. Checkout work by Briedenthal and Edwards on the matter.
deleted 5y ago
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