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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."
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
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.
No. Just realistic and sober.
Space mission faster and more ambitious than NASA financed by reality TV and application fees?????
Crew selected by casting?????
Seriously? It's a scam. Nothing else.
Not one of these hopeful wannabe astronaut will even step aboard something remotely similar to a rocket.
...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?
It would be interesting to test how much lag existing technology can handle, but let's please do it here on Earth before we test it across the solar system.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Space mission faster and more ambitious than NASA financed by reality TV and application fees?
They did manage to get the Moon landing done is fairly short order - in the 1960s - (obviously not as ambitious as going to / living on Mars) but, sadly, present-day NASA is crippled by the fear of people actually dying, LOTS of bureaucracy, politics (internal and external) and Congress. If the Government (meaning "we the People") *really* wanted to be on Mars, we'd be there.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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).
Latency isn't really that difficult to deal with.
The protocol mainly needs to know how much data can be sent for how long (blindly) before expecting ACKs.
Retransmission would require larger buffers (enough for about 20 minutes of data).
If you intend to browse an earth website from Mars, you'd need an earth based gateway to ensure it actually worked.
Of most everyday applications, aside from telephony, banking would be a big challenge. Secure sites time out too quickly for any Martian to hold a connection long enough to log in and perform a transaction.
Over time though, once a colony was established, the vast majority of data would be cached on Mars.
To enable constant communications between earth and Mars though, I suspect a constellation of solar orbiting satellites at the midpoint of Earth and Mars' orbits and a constellation over Mars would be required. This would dramatically increase latency and require some very clever management to keep them aligned, but it would allow a constant link.
Another option is to put satellites in a solar orbit perpendicular to Earth and Mars, but I suspect that would require enormous amounts of energy.
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
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.
"enough" being one (or more). One satellite in Earth's L4 or L5 Lagrange points, and you have sight around the sun. If you don't use that natural gravity saddle, you might want to use a gravity hole, such as Jupiter to put another, though to stop Jupiter from getting in the way, you'd still need to use a Lagrange point, I'd recommend L1.
This doesn't seem like a hard problem. You can even launch three, Earth L4 &L5, and Jupiter L1 to have redundant and diverse coverage. Though no idea if they were looking for something in a more stable orbit, as Lagrange points take corrections to remain in. Or if those sorts of details were the point of the study.
Learn to love Alaska
Heh! I'm just imagining Martian colonists using UUCP. I'd love to see some Martian bang paths.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
After opening the Mars One web site, why do I get the feeling that their concept artist is oddly familiar with trailer parks?
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.
If you take that long to get to Mars, you aren't going to need long term life support when you get there.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Laser link over 600 Mbps tested
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yeah. Instead we should build a new factory in China where children can assemble happy meal toys for other children half the world away to play with for five minutes and throw away. That at least has a legitimate business purpose of getting children addicted to greasy food and low fructose corn syrup. Mars! Some people!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Crew selected by casting?????
I heard on the radio a person who has been short listed for this. She sounded like one of the hectic/hyper women* who will be talking constantly. If that's indicative of their crew selection then I'm going to start a sweep stake on when the a crew member murders the rest.
* She's probably has big tits and is pretty.
A TV test pattern, a radio, or an old landline touchtone phone. Problem solved.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
They do plan to order at least a few feasibility studies from serious companies in the process. And they draw public attention to the whole topic. I think that's good. I would not give them my money, but I don't mind others doing so. And speaking about reality shows, this one (even about the selection process and training) will not be the worst one, so a small win again.
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...
Anything is bossible. Its only matter of question how much effort and resources its going to take to make it happen.
... in orbit around L4/L5 of Mars. Problem solved.
Only two are needed. Minimum. One would work, but there would be times that both it and Mars could be out of reach (solar storms and such).
60 degrees ahead of mars and 60 degrees behind.
The big problem is that they would need to be resupplied with fuel to maintain their position - roughly every 5 years.
Agree. Though the plan is far-fetched, they are approaching it seriously and have some "credible" people on the team. To me, the most "low-credibility" aspect is their ambitious schedule. For many folks, the sheer audacity of the plan also hurts their credibility. But this may change somewhat in the next few years, as more and more privately funded space projects make headlines.
A few examples:
- both Virgin Galactic and XCOR start service to paying passengers
- SpaceX launches first Falcon Heavy, first man-rated Dragon, and first reusable stage
- MoonEx (or some other team) wins the Google Lunar X-Prize
- Planetary Resources launches its first swarm of asteroid-hunting satellites
As people see more private-sector success stories and costs keep coming down, the Mars-One plan might not seem so far-fetched anymore. It will be interesting to see...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
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.
What's the feasibility of a neutrino beam for communication?
One of those could probably shoot through the sun - eliminating a ton of relays and launches.
It's not entirely science fiction.
Thankfully, these days we have maps and won't have to bang our way to mars. UUCP wouldn't be a satisfactory solution, however, because it's designed to get instant confirmation of delivery before retiring a job from the queue. What is needed is a new daemon that sends messages via UDP with high redundancy and keeps trying to deliver as time slots become available until receipt is reported.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We had an on-TV competition back home, to find the first person from our country to "go into space" (non-orbital), ticket paid by the TV show! ... ...latest news, someone else, completely unrelated to the TV show, is now training to become an astronaut, and will likely be the first one.
Some woman won, and was told she would be the first one
(have not been able to find anything about what happended to the TV show contestant).
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.
Already been thought of, seventy years ago!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Equilateral
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.
This doesn't seem like a hard problem. You can even launch three, Earth L4 &L5, and Jupiter L1 to have redundant and diverse coverage. Though no idea if they were looking for something in a more stable orbit, as Lagrange points take corrections to remain in. Or if those sorts of details were the point of the study.
"As of March 2013, Falcon 9 launch prices are $4,109 per kilogram ($1,864/lb) to low-Earth orbit when the launch vehicle is transporting its maximum cargo weight." This is currently one of the cheapest ways to get to LEO. L4 and L5 are a lot farther out and Jupiter...hahahahaha. I doubt a private entity would be able to fund this. As was said somewhere above, the chances of this stunt getting to the point of putting people on the surface of Mars is laughable. It will probably take them a generation just to get to get the prelim research and logistics worked out before even thinking about astronaut training, so anyone "selected" now would probably see their child go instead. If it doesn't just fall flat on its face in the next few years. Time will tell, and it is not in their favor.
Essentially you could do it with two, but 4 gives you the redundancy needed.
I'll see your two, and raise you to "one".
A single satellite just a few million miles above (or below) the orbital plane of our solar system will always have line-of-sight to both Earth and Mars (and also to Jupiter and Venus, as a bonus). Even our own relatively huge moon won't occlude that.
Of course, "uninterrupted" has problems other than actual occlusion by a planet/sun/moon. CMEs could always knock out communications no matter how much redundancy we put in place; and you need to factor in a wide range of latencies - A hair over three minutes at opposition, but up to a whopping 22 minutes at apheliion (actually, 1337 seconds, for a funny coincidence).
Sure would be interesting if you had the guts to put your handle out there when making these claims of "Not one of these hopeful wannabe astronaut will even step aboard something remotely similar to a rocket." so come 2023-2024, when the first four colonists land on Mars, we can show you what a doubting Thomas you were back in 2014.. Frankly, I believe Mars-one has a FAR better chance of accomplishing this than any government or consortium of governments.. Anyway, I wish them all the luck in the world and look forward to seeing the telecast of the landing of four humans on Mars in 2024.. I should still be around then, hopefully (74 then)...
Anyway I prefer to think positive, and I think Basdorp and his advisors have an excellent plan to accomplish this...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
If you look at his "team", you see half of it is artists and online social media strategists. This company is designed around social media and conning people out of money. Mars is a distraction to them to use to collect gullible people's money.
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!
I think either they would be fueled by either solar or atomic, like Voyagers. I would design the sats with external fuel tanks of some sort that could be robotically detached and replaced by a drone that just travels slowly back and forth, using some ion-style drive.
Technologically it's possible. The issue is resourcing. It'd be a mega-project, ranking as one of the most expensive things mankind has ever done. Is there the political will or public drive for something like that?
As for desireable, that's easy. We have to get off this planet sooner or later, because somewhere out there is the Big Fuckin' Rock that's going to hit us. Perhaps not for a few years, perhaps not for a few million, but it will happen.
Another issue it the limited capacity of large dishes capable of communicating with these distant sats. The Deep Space Network is showing it's age, not doing required maintenance, and only has three locations across the planet and limited bandwidth. This isn't like communicating even with e geosync sat but WAY further out. I doubt Mars One is capable of building their own DSN, but I could see them tossing NASA some money to fix up the current DSN to support their colony.
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.
Which was the point. The basics of the solution are obvious. The question becomes, what's this study actually studying? Details? Comparing and contrasting Venus's L4 to Earth's? The summary has no details, and TFA doesn't go into any more detail.
Learn to love Alaska
You crowdsource all non-vital problems to Slashdot.
Learn to love Alaska
So you are asserting they can send a large ship to Mars, but not a communications satellite into very high earth orbit? (yes, I realize you are saying they can't send anything to Mars either, but if they could, the extra cost of the communications wouldn't be a huge portion of the budget)
Learn to love Alaska
Comparing a trip to the Moon to a trip to Mars belies your complete cretinism.
Google "distance" and compare that of the Moon to that of Mars.
Except for the part where I said, "(obviously not as ambitious as going to / living on Mars)". I know their respective distances and delta-v budgets; I can read and learned *some* math/physics for my BSCS - way back in 1987. The fact is, since we can *actually* send things to Mars, we *could* send people, if we wanted to.
And really there's no need for rude name-calling.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
And all that radiation goodness? What about that?
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Well a 1 km cubic detector is not small, or the 20km particle acceleration to make the neutrinos. And after all that you going to have a very poor bit rate. Of course it still won't work since the sun pumps out a lot of neutrinos and that would kill the already very poor S/N ratio. The can go right through the sun... they can also go right through the detector.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
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.
There isn't a need for it. They even say it is being discussed, but isn't mandatory.
There would never be a rescue mission. It's a one-way suicide mission.
Learn to love Alaska
I don't understand the need for continuous communication.
They want to fund it by showing it on TV.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You use lasers for this.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Yes, to some degree a single satelite solution would be possible. It would work best as a solution for mars if it were to orbit the sun perpendicular to the earth-moon line at opposition, with an eliptical orbit with a period such that at opposition, the satelite would be either as far north of the sun as the orbit would allow, or as far south.
I would still argue for relays at L4 and L5, but then there are more than a few people interested in setting up stations there anyway. Possibly easier to establish would be a sun-earth l4/l5 pair (vs. the traditional earth-moon lagrange points) as just those two should give sufficient spread to se around the sun, without being incapable of being repaired easily.
You never know...
Actually, the problem with IP is the TTL and Timeouts that are configured. a ttl of 255 seconds is built into IP, (and any protocol riding on IP like UDP) which means that the packet is considered dead after 255 seconds (or the combination of x seconds and y hops adding up to 255.) Switching to IPv6 does not help, as the only significant change to the field is the name, where it changed from Time To Live to Hop Limit. It is still an 8 bit field, meaning it is a maximum of 255. If the protocol when switching to solar system communications changes to purely hop limit, and stops decrementing the counter each second, you may be able to get away with it, but you will have a large legacy of implementation of protocols on top of IP that rely on this that will essentially be broken as a result.
The suggestion of DecNet was specifically make use of timeout value in the DecNet protocol. Using a connectionless protocol on top of it seems reasonable to me, but I would actually be OK with almost any protocol that would not expire packets in transit and start trying to saturate the bandwidth with retransmittions.
You never know...
Actually, the problem with IP is the TTL and Timeouts that are configured. a ttl of 255 seconds is built into IP, (and any protocol riding on IP like UDP) which means that the packet is considered dead after 255 seconds (or the combination of x seconds and y hops adding up to 255.)
That's a matter of convention, and it's up to the receiver to decide whether to discard a packet or not. Nothing prevents a gateway from jiggering those numbers, either.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Couldn't you use the Sun-Earth L4 & L5?
Arguably, the big problem is when Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun so that direct communicatiosn become impossible. Which is what you address with 60 degrees ahead and behind Mars. The advantage to the la grangian point is the stability that would mitigate the need for fuel for maneuvering.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
/*
* [...] Note that 120 sec is defined in the protocol as the maximum
* possible RTT. I guess we'll have to use something other than TCP
* to talk to the University of Mars.
* PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once implemented
* ftp to mars will work nicely.
*/
(from /usr/src/linux/net/inet/tcp.c, concerning RTT [retransmission timeout])
If by one-way suicide, you mean they go there and die there, then the difference in going there and staying here is 1) expected remaining lifetime, and 2) having fewer others present for that remaining lifetime. Staying here is a zero-way suicide mission. But yes, I wouldn't expect anyone to have the delusion that they'd be rescued should they run out of food or encounter hostile Martians.
I've never watched more than 30 seconds of any "reality show". But this is one I'd give an hour or two of my time for a trial. So have they begun weeding through the volunteers, selecting for the narcissistic melodramatic sort?
Don't forget Mad Max. Time for a fourth installment—this time, from another planet. Come to think of it, residents of Alice Springs might already have some necessary skills.
What are you talking about? The question was about a rescue. There was no rescue for Columbus. There is no rescue for many on Everest. When you go somewhere difficult, you waive your rights to rescue. That was the point, not an existential waxing on mortality.
Learn to love Alaska
Heh, good question. It does seem that the intersection between the set of people who have the scientific mindset and unflappable temperament ideal for operating effectively in life-threatening situations and the set of people who have entertaining "TV personalities" is probably very small.
Possibly empty.
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