London, October 17: The sun can block direct communication between Earth and Mars for weeks at a time, cutting off any potential mission to the red planet. The solution – satellites on special orbits around Mars.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is working on how to ensure reliable radio communication when Mars and Earth line up at opposite sides of the sun, blocking any signal between mission controllers on Earth and astronauts on Mars.
The natural alignment, known as a conjunction, happens approximately every 780 days, and would seriously degrade and even block transmission of voice, data and video signals.
Researchers have proposed an innovative solution by placing a pair of communication relay satellites into a very special type of orbit near Mars: a so-called ‘B-orbit’ (against an ‘A-orbit’, based on natural orbital laws).
However, to counter the effects of gravity and remain in place, they would have to be equipped with cutting-edge electric ion propulsion.
Such ion thrusters, powered by solar power and using tiny amounts of xenon gas as propellant, would hold the satellites in a B-orbit in full view of both Mars and Earth.
The satellites could then relay radio signals throughout the Mars-Earth conjunction season, ensuring that astronauts at Mars were never out of sync with Earth, says an ESA release.
These findings were released this week at the 60th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), the world’s biggest space event, in Daejeon, South Korea.
Peter Brown, university associate professor who is an expert in the study of meteors and meteorite falls, and Phil McCausland showed the meteorite to the media in the presence of the Garchinski family Friday.
“Having both the video and the sample is golden because we get the dynamic information and the orbital direction from the video, and by having recovered material on the ground, we can complete the picture,” said McCausland.
“We can take a rock that we now have in hand and we can study it in the best laboratories in the world and we can put it back into its solar system context. We can put it back into where it came from,” he said.
“In all of history, only about a dozen meteorite falls have that kind of record.”
Brown added: “Scientifically, it’s equivalent to a sample return mission, which is sending a spacecraft out to a known location in the solar system and bringing back a sample. In this case though, the sample comes to us. We don’t have to spend huge sums of money to send a spacecraft to get the sample.”
He said, “We have worked out the orbit, where it came from, so it becomes a material within context. It’s like a geologist who can pick up a rock which may be interesting, but if you know where it came from, that context, it means so much more. Most meteorites – we don’t have the context. This one we do.”
The Garchinski family has loaned the meteorite sample to the university, but it will remain their property.
–Agencies