Why would you need to wait for opposition? As long as you have direct line of sight to Mars, that is good enough. Granted, the latency is only going to increase

Why would you need to wait for opposition? As long as you have direct line of sight to Mars, that is good enough. Granted, the latency is only going to increase when not in opposition, but they already have ways to deal with that, such as IPN. [1] Conjunction, of course, would be a much tougher feat without some sort of relay system. I'm sure that wouldn't be insurmountable though, and I think they built that into IPN as well, just like how the internet can route around problem areas. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Internet