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Right now, Mars rovers similar Curiosity get roughly fifteen minutes to talk to scientists dorsum on Earth, twice per twenty-four hour period. If a scientist wants to effect a complex set of orders, or download a whole bunch of new information, it has to all fit into these 15-minute windows. For scientists on the footing, the necessity of bouncing signals through multiple orbiting satellites means that rover missions progress as a serial of quick snapshots, with tense waits in betwixt. Now, they have a prototype for a new and improved type of rover antenna, i that could turn those minutes into hours, and those orbiters into space junk.

The idea comes from a group working on avant-garde antenna technology at UCLA, in combination with NASA's Jet Propulsion laboratory. The idea is basically to utilise an array of 256 antenna elements (a xvi x sixteen foursquare) all working together to make a "super-antenna" capable of directly communicating with Earth. Having fewer moving bodies to worry most keeping in alignment, this system could give a rover up to several hours of communication time with operators back on Earth, every day.

mars antenna 4The reason it works is not just that the array of mini-antennas creates a more powerful signal, but that the signal is circularly polarized. This has the event of keeping the signal coherent as it travels through the Martian atmosphere — in one case a bespeak gets into the vacuum of space with good indicate strength intact, getting the rest of the way to an orbiter around the Earth isn't difficult at all.

Amazingly, this huge increase in signal force will withal run inside the power limitations of NASA's upcoming Mars 2020 rover: it has but nearly 100 watts to allot to communications, or about enough to keep an incandescent lightbulb shining. For that power commitment, it will purportedly exist able to maintain a signal with a satellite around Earth, 225 meg kilometers away. The 2020 mission may well be NASA'southward major forerunner to the start of a manned mission, so information technology will important to see if it can serve as a proof of concept for direct communications between the Earth and Mars.

The additive characteristics of its chemical compound antenna actually work in both directions; non just volition it exist able to create more powerful signals to transmit dorsum to Earth, but it will be able topick up more powerful signals besides. This will give information technology a amend ability to download information from the Globe, widening the lines of advice for both scientists and their rover.

mars antenna 3The Mars 2020 rover won't have the luxury of twisting effectually to make certain information technology'due south pointing at the Earth at every moment, and so the antenna is planned to exist mounted on a gimbal arm that can elevator the antenna and orient it in any direction. This unrestrained antenna mount, combined with the circular polarization of the signal itself, should too allow the rover to transmit and receive while on the motility, meaning that those hours of telephone time don't need to be wasted.

Right now, the UCLA team has merely made a iv-element-by-iv-element epitome. But this prototype behaved just the way their simulations expected, and as it had to if their 16-past-16 version was going to work. A total-scale prototype is in the works.