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Mars One Studying How To Maintain Communications With Mars 24/7
braindrainbahrain writes "Mars One, the low-credibility effort to colonize Mars, is at least funding some interesting concept studies for their alleged plan to colonize the red planet. One of the most interesting is the effort to maintain uninterrupted communications with Mars. This is not as trivial as it may sound, as any satellite in Martian orbit will still have to deal with occultations between Mars and Earth due to the Sun. Surrey Satellite Technology will be performing the study."
the low-credibility effort to colonize Mars
way to maintain journalistic neutrality there.
This is not as trivial as it may sound...
Really? from...
the low-credibility effort to colonize Mars...
Yes frome these people, it *is* "trivial".
Seriously, let's not waste money and time with these people when there are serious scientists that are not getting the support they need for serious research.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"Mars One , the low-credibility effort to colonize Mars, is at least funding some interesting concept studies for their alleged plan to colonize the red planet /quote Someone seems to not have much faith
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
No Mars....
Put some satellites in orbit around the sun. Enough of them and you'll always be able to see at least one of them from either planet, and they can relay between each other. We already have the technology, its called the Internet. Make the satellites routers.
Send one twin to mars, the other twin stays on Earth. They telepathically communicate. Oh wait, wrong novel?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
...that the NSA is in charge of the communications. National Space Administration?
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Can anyone think of a more credible or likely way to fund a trip to mars? It's not public funding..if putting fucking honey boo boo on Mars it's what gets the effort funded I'm ok with that. How else do you get the citizens of idiocracy to fund the effort?
Low-credibility means corporations are not interested. And why should they be? There is no money to be made in helping slaves emigrate to a place far away from the control of Earth corporations.
Just throw a few communication satellites in the Earth-Sun L3 and L4/L5 (or both, for redundancy) points and finish developing that interplanetary internet protocol for them, then call it a day. This really should be trivial with existing tech, once the protocol is finished and if someone wants to fund the rocket launches. Seriously, if we can do the STEREO mission, we can do this.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
Once per synodic period (779.94 days) you will lose 10 days or so during superior conjunction, or ~ 1.3% of the time. NASA gives its spaceships at Mars a vacation (for the rovers, generally a long integration X ray spectrum of some rock). If Mars One really worries losing contact even for that little, they can either build a cycler, or put a relay somewhere else (say, orbiting Venus).
Mars is one place which scientist still searching for lives. hope one day they got success and reveal surprising to us.
Run the whole thing from a abandoned United States Army Air Corps desert base and 24/7 communications won't be a problem.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So if we do manage to send the ship with all of the bureaucrats and hair stylists and telephone sanitizers to Mars, what is the point of trying to maintain communications 24/7? After all, pretty much anything that you do without science fiction technology is going to have a round trip delay of up to 1/2 hour or so at some times. The "colony" has to be pretty damn independent. I don't see any real need to convince yourself that you have 24/7 communications with delays like they would experience. Even daily communication would need some sort of relay when the sun gets in the way, but trying for 24/7 is overkill and pointless.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Why do we not have relay communications equipment at lagrange points L4 and L5? Am I missing something here, even if we aren't talking about this study?
What? No need? How about we create a need!
The US could build hundreds of thousands of airplanes and hundreds of ships (literally) in less than 4 years.
Now? The government can't even build a healthcare website that works. Maybe they don't want it to work.
Shouldn't they be using Martian units? I know a Martian Day is a bit longer than 24 hrs, not sure about their weeks
Essentially you could do it with two, but 4 gives you the redundancy needed. Start by putting a satelite in orbit around the sun on Earth's orbit, but leading by 120 degrees. A second trailing by 120 degrees. At all times you'll have at least one unobstructed LOS path to Mars, and most of the time 3. That said, the distance is enough that it would be a good idea to double the possible paths. Put two more satelites up in orbit of the sun, on Mars orbit, one leading by 120 degrees, one trailing by 120 degrees. Make sure that all four of these satelites track Mars, Earth, and preferably each other.
You could also just put three satelites in orbit of the sun in Venus orbit, 60 degrees before and behind, and at 180 degrees, The advantage here is that you have more theoretical power available via solar collection here. The down side is more hard radiation to contend with. Additional down side here is that these three points are not quite as stable for orbit mantenance as the 120 degree trojan points for Earth and Mars.
Latency is high enough, in any of these paths that you will not be using IP. DECnet protocol would be sufficient. Worst case path from Mars to MarsT1/2, to Earth in opposition to Mars would be on the close order of 600 million kilometers one way, 1,200 million kilometers round trip. Divide that by 300,000 km and we get a round trip light speed time of roughly 4000 seconds, or a little over an hour and 6 min., not including signal regeneration time.
Ok, a theoretically worse path that might have to be taken would be where earth's moon is between Earth and Mars, and the Earth-Moon pair is on the cord between Mars and we are limited to using the other Martian Trojan orbital point, which gives a round trip distance of close to 1,500 Million kilometers. Though I would immagine that it would be easier to put a couple of satelites at L4 and L5, or even a constelation of polar orbiting satelites of the moon would effectively address that, and I suspect it would be less expensive to establish.
You never know...
So that's how the Martians roll. They don't have a decimal system, they use fractions! They even have fractional Mars stations -- maybe they haven't discovered integers yet.
You mean utilize quantum entanglement? Maybe by the time someone is actually ready to go to Mars, they'll have developed the idea far enough to actually do it. Until then: Lasers.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
After opening the Mars One web site, why do I get the feeling that their concept artist is oddly familiar with trailer parks?
Finding out what is wrong psychologically with people who think colonizing Mars is possible or desirable.
Why would you want to use quantum entanglement for communication with Mars? If you are after faster-than-light communication, quantum entanglement is not going to help you. (and it is extremely unlikely anything else would either)
It's the opposite of idiocracy. You see, we gave the finger to Darwin a long time ago with our medical science... Mars is a hostile and unforgiving environment. Ship a constant stream of idiots there and only the strong and less stupid survive... Radioactive resistant ones survive longer. Mars One has a chance to rekindle evolution. We'll waste a bunch of life burrowing into the ground, but that's the best place to avoid cosmic rays, and after that it wouldn't even necessarily have to be a death sentence to be born on Mars. Though I'd be pissed at my parents for brining me into such a harsh existence with no way back to Earth, so there's still that.
Additionally, the transmission problem has been around for a while. Even NASA had curiosity go dark for a while, so it's something that does legitimately need to be solved. We could solve it with a relay station in a different orbit. Would be nice to get something like that out of the planetary plane. Then it could beam between any two points on the disk whether planets were along the direct path or not -- At least that's how I did it in my networking simulation of the interplanetary Delay Tolerant Network. Hey, if there's going to people on Mars eventually, I plan to capitalize on it. Why not make sure my programs function in space?
Really though, we need to ditch the wold-wide-web. It's just dumb -- no, really, it has no idea what a file even is. A store and forward network with content hashes instead of URLs (filenames as human-readable nicknames) gives everyone free collocation, and decentralizes data storage, it's also much harder to snoop on because you could be downloading a popular video, picture, etc. from your neighbors who just watched it -- So it's even better on bandwidth. You rename the file 30 different ways and the network only has to transit one copy and set of info hashes. Bonus: No more "mixed content" warnings. A secured page pulling in resources by hash code knows they aren't tampered with. Yeah, the space Internet would kick even more ass here on Earth, can't wait to see what new tech the Mars race brings.
Mars One, has the right idea -- Reminds me of when Kennedy said we'd put men on the moon. You don't have to have everything planned out before you commit to a goal, and their goal isn't even as hard -- Don't even have to build their own rockets. A journey of 40 million miles starts with a single moronic impulse.
A TV test pattern, a radio, or an old landline touchtone phone. Problem solved.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
...more like zero
How hard is it to maintain a fiber to the fake Mars base in the Atamaca desert?
Its not difficult to maintain constant connection, add few satellites in good spots in space to bounce signal throw.. Its bandwidth issue. They want to make reality tv out of this so that's going to take some massive bandwidth between two planets. Video streaming down on earth is sometimes difficult all ready.. Add significant distance between planets that's constantly changing and you have problems...
... in orbit around L4/L5 of Mars. Problem solved.
Sham or not, the studies Mars One must engage in to at least look credible do represent real science. Whether or not they plan on actually getting people to Mars (I'm betting not) the ideas they are forced to approach could potentially serve as real foundation and R&D time saver for actually getting there someday.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
You mean utilize quantum entanglement? Maybe by the time someone is actually ready to go to Mars, they'll have developed the idea far enough to actually do it. Until then: Lasers.
Yes, a laser so powerful it will punch a hole through the sun.
Why is this -1? It should be +5.
It's the 21st century, man. Get with it.
I thought they had been doing experiments with quantum entanglement that had possible implications for communications.
No, not FTL communications. I was thinking communications over long distances that wouldn't have many of the drawbacks of using radio. Oh well.. But I'm pretty sure NASA has been working on using laser communications between the Earth and the Moon, haven't they?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Entanglement only gives you correlations between the two sides, nothing more. You always need a second, classical, link, which in this case would be radio or laser. The only thing you can send with entanglement itself is random numbers. This does have some uses in encryption but is hardly neccesery, unless all symmetric ciphers somehow get broken. And it does severly limit your bandwidth compared to using just radio/laser.
I'm betting I'll need more than four AA batteries.
The major obstacle is initial funding. Here's the link to the indiegogo campaign. Right now it's at something like $150k of $400k. Once they successfully land something on Mars, demonstrate they can manufacture water, oxygen and plenty of electricity on Mars, they will be taken a lot more serious. Until then, it's just the odd one out that's putting their money where there dreams are.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Just put a few mirrors in orbit. Problem solved.
.. to put some communications satellites into orbit around the Sun.