How large amounts of data must be transmitted from Mars to Earth

To send an urgent message to the West Coast of the United States in the nineteenth century, the Pony Express First choice. The riders’ relay managed the 3,100km route in about 10 days. The researchers took inspiration from this Communication with alien planets To speed up.

Solar Pony Express

This “rapid solar pony” is a concept developed by scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Small ones are like “horses”. spacecraft or satelliteswhich are sent to Mars, for example, to receive data near the transmitter.

The data is then returned to Earth where it is passed on to a receiver. This is communication with Aaliyah bandwidth maybe. However, this is also high delaywith which the data reaches the Earth.

The satellites move in what is called “cyclic orbitsThese are the orbits in which a rocket regularly passes two objects in space. A satellite travels to Mars in 146 days, spending 16 months there and travels back to Earth in 146 days, where it spends another 16 months.

Messenger satellite network

“Maybe network “By interplanetary data carriers that regularly fly past Earth and Mars,” says researcher Robin Woollands, who co-created the model. Small, cheap satellites launched into space suffice.

The spacecraft will also need a little fuel – they get their leadership from gravity Universe. The researchers simulated a roadwhich accounts for the gravitational pull of Earth, Mars, and the Sun, with very few Path corrections gets by. This will be a transfer 1 petabyte per year possible – the equivalent of 125 terabytes.