Can You Hear Me Now?

Background:

Communication with Earth will be one of the many challenges humans face while conducting missions to and on Mars. For example, a reply to a question may take over twenty minutes to receive because of the incredible distance the communication signal must travel. Think of how that simple fact would impact the types of communication an astronaut can make with Earth, and vice versa. A phone call, for example, would not be reasonable.

To further complicate the situation, there are periods during the year when the sun is between Earth and Mars, and communication between the two is impossible. Communication speeds might also change over time, as the distance from Earth to Mars varies from 0.5 Astronomical Units (AU, 1 AU being roughly the distance between the Earth and the Sun) to 1.5 AU.

There are important infrastructure considerations because of the high latency of communication signals to and from Earth. For example, how do you pass information from one astronaut to another on the surface? Is there a local relay or host of data, so that data is not repeated?

Your challenge is to design an interactive application to explore the challenge of communicating with astronauts on Mars from Earth. Think about all of the different methods of communication we use here on Earth, including communicating with astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Which of these methods would still be useful on Mars, and which may not be easy to implement?

Potential Considerations:

• The purpose of this challenge isn’t to create a communication device, but rather to devise some way of exploring the problem. Your solution could be a game, a demo, or some other interactive application.
• Right now, communication between Earth and Mars orbit is done site-to-site, without any relaying devices in-between. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this setup? Think about how your application could demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages in the user experience.
• How would coverage change based on time of day and time of "Earth Rise / Earth Set" if no relay is used?
• Bandwidth is very limited when sending data millions of miles. How do the various communication methods compare according to bandwidth? In what situations would certain methods be advantageous over others?
• How could your application present all of this information to gamify the experience, if you choose to make a game-like solution.
• What options would astronauts on Mars have for browsing the internet?

For data and resources related to this challenge, refer to the Resources tab at the top of the page.

NASA does not endorse any non-U.S. Government entity and is not responsible for information contained on non-U.S. Government websites.