Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?
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).
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.
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
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.
It's not your money. I say let them have their fun.
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.
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.