Question

You are a wireless communication specialist working with an ambitious exploratory firm named PROJECT-SPACE. The firm is embarking on a huge project to build a human habitat in planet Mars. In 25 years, PROJECT-SPACE projected that the human habitat will gradually evolved into a small space city with the population of 1000 occupants. The initial habitat should be able to accommodate 15 Martians with consistent, stable and reliable communication from Mars to the planet Earth command center back in the capital of the country.

1) How Internet, data rate, noise and bandwidth be sufficient to achieve stable and reliable communication from Mars to S.I. for 10 people and able to scale up to 1000 people in the future?
2) How Martian atmospheric effect reacts to wireless signals?
3) How do you panned to power up your wireless access-points and communication device?
4) What would be the time difference, latency (delay) in communication based on your proposed data rate and bandwidth?

Answer 1

(1) Mars has actively been studied since the 1960s, and has got advanced instruments onboard called Landers and Orbiters. Some factors such as the huge difference in the orbit between Earth and Mars ,the geometry between the two planets around the Sun and absence of powerful transmitters are the primary reason behind the slow data rate.

In the past,,Radio waves were used to access the internet as these waves were not interfered by the atmosphere. But in the near future a DELAY/DISRUPTION TOLERANT NETWORKING will be used for internet access between earth and mars.DTN is nothing but a computer networking model and system that can operate efficiently in environments where networks are prone to frequent disruptions, long delays and high error rates. In space applications, DTN offers more reliable data transmissions that use bandwidth more efficiently.An Internet between Mars and Earth would likely yield a data transfer rate of 11,000 bps. According to the Mars Network ,researchers believe that the transfer rate could eventually go to about 1 Mbps .

For high speed internet between Earth and Mars, there are two solutions:

(A)Mars-Earth direct and relays through Lagrangian points

(B)Space based multi-hop

(2)The Martian atmosphere is made up of layers (34 E-layers )and rifts(areas with abnormally few charged particles that are the opposite of E layers and have never been spotted on Earth).Some weird clumps of air that disrupt radio signals have been found on Mars.

(3) To power up the wireless access-points and communication device ,an  electrical power subsystem is responsible for generating, storing, and distributing power to the orbiter systems and includes two solar panels and two nickel-hydrogen batteries:During the nights, batteries provide the necessary electrical power. The batteries recharge each "day" (using only part of the electricity produced by the solar cells) and discharge each "night" to keep the spacecraft supplied with electricity.

(4)Mars is quite far  away that it takes radio signals quite a long time to get from the spacecraft back to Earth. This delay will be 13 minutes, 48 seconds, about mid-way between the minimum delay of around 4 minutes and the maximum of around 24 minutes.The latency is nothing to do with the hardware on the ground – it can’t be improved by a faster computer or a more powerful radio. In fact it is obeying the fundamental speed limit of the universe – the speed of light.The latency  betweenEarth and Mars is usually called the One-Way Light Time (OWLT) and the time for a message to go to Mars and come back is the Two-Way Light Time (TWLT), or round-trip time.