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Right now, Mars rovers like Curiosity become roughly xv minutes to talk to scientists dorsum on Earth, twice per day. If a scientist wants to upshot a complex set up of orders, or download a whole bunch of new information, information technology has to all fit into these 15-minute windows. For scientists on the ground, the necessity of bouncing signals through multiple orbiting satellites means that rover missions progress as a series of quick snapshots, with tense waits in between. At present, they have a paradigm for a new and improved type of rover antenna, one that could plough those minutes into hours, and those orbiters into infinite junk.

The thought comes from a grouping working on advanced antenna engineering at UCLA, in combination with NASA'south Jet Propulsion laboratory. The thought is basically to use an array of 256 antenna elements (a 16 x sixteen square) all working together to brand a "super-antenna" capable of directly communicating with World. Having fewer moving bodies to worry about keeping in alignment, this arrangement could give a rover upwardly to several hours of advice fourth dimension with operators back on Globe, every 24-hour interval.

mars antenna 4The reason it works is not simply that the array of mini-antennas creates a more powerful signal, but that the bespeak is circularly polarized. This has the effect of keeping the signal coherent every bit it travels through the Martian temper — once a signal gets into the vacuum of space with good signal force intact, getting the residue of the manner to an orbiter around the Earth isn't hard at all.

Amazingly, this huge increase in bespeak strength will even so run inside the power limitations of NASA'southward upcoming Mars 2022 rover: it has just about 100 watts to allot to communications, or virtually enough to go along an incandescent lightbulb shining. For that ability delivery, it will purportedly exist able to maintain a signal with a satellite around Earth, 225 million kilometers away. The 2022 mission may well be NASA'due south major precursor to the get-go of a manned mission, so it will important to see if information technology tin can serve as a proof of concept for direct communications between the Earth and Mars.

The additive characteristics of its compound antenna really work in both directions; not only volition information technology be able to create more than powerful signals to transmit back to Earth, but information technology will be able topick up more than powerful signals as well. This will give information technology a meliorate ability to download information from the Earth, widening the lines of advice for both scientists and their rover.

mars antenna 3The Mars 2022 rover won't have the luxury of twisting effectually to make certain it's pointing at the Earth at every moment, and so the antenna is planned to be mounted on a gimbal arm that can lift 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 move, meaning that those hours of phone time don't need to be wasted.

Correct now, the UCLA team has only made a 4-element-by-4-element epitome. But this prototype behaved but the style their simulations expected, and as it had to if their xvi-by-16 version was going to piece of work. A full-scale paradigm is in the works.