Posted on 01/31/2006 6:04:38 PM PST by KevinDavis
New orbiter will provide future missions with high data rates
When NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reaches the Red Planet next month, it will immediately seek out areas where water once flowed, try to identify habitats where ancient life might have thrived, and start mapping the entire planet in unprecedented detail. But the orbiter's arrival at Mars will also set the stage for a new epoch in spacecraft telecommunications. Its onboard Electra UHF relay transceiver [see photo, "Relay"] will serve as an engineering test bed for new communications and navigation technology that will be required for all future orbiters, landers, and rovers, to provide the faster data rates required for transfer of information from rovers and landers on the Martian surface to orbiters circling above.
The early Mars landers, like the 1976 Viking and the 1997 Mars Pathfinder, sent data directly back to Earth using X-Band antennas that could manage no more than 1 to 10 kilobits per second of data. But when Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004 to explore its surface, they carried cameras that could produce dramatic panoramic pictures representing 500 megabytes of data. Accordingly, rather than transfer data straight back to Earth, their X-Band system first transferred data to the Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey orbiters, which were equipped with UHF transceivers that could support transfer rates of up to 128 kb/s.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectrum.ieee.org ...
Cool. Looks like we'll all get to go to Mars.
I'm not going if I can't DSL into FR!
"try to identify habitats where ancient life might have thrived"
Christ on a crutch! I'm so tired of this BS! RESOURCES is what it's about.
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