“Over the life of the mission, MAVEN supported more than 8 percent of all of our relay sessions planned by our rovers and landers, but it accounted for nearly 18 percent of all of the data returned, illustrating its usefulness when returning large data volumes,” said Tiffany Morgan, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.
The network still has plenty of capacity to support the Perseverance and Curiosity rovers, with some minor caveats.
“We do have remaining assets, and those assets have adjusted the amount of data that they return, and the rovers have also adjusted their planning for how they connect to those assets,” Morgan said. “There is a slight delay on occasion, because we don’t have as many assets in view, to getting our science data back, and MAVEN was critical in returning science data versus operational data. But the Mars Relay Network is resilient enough at this point in time to accommodate, for the most part, the loss of MAVEN with the added delay.”
NASA is asking commercial companies to develop a replacement for the existing Mars Relay Network. The new commercial system, called the Mars Telecommunications Network, is expected to provide higher throughput and broader coverage for NASA’s future missions to the red planet.
“Instead of each mission designing its own communications solution, we’ll build in a more capable architecture deliberately designed for Mars,” said Greg Heckler, deputy program manager for capability development at NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation office. “It will be built on the lessons from MAVEN, from the other orbiters, from every mission operating in this environment, including the current rovers, and from some of our growing endeavors around the Moon.”
NASA wants the Mars Telecommunications Network to be operational by the 2030s. The agency released a request for proposals last month.
“I think there’s … urgency,” Heckler said. “I think NASA establishing this infrastructure is going to be very important to continue science operations of the current missions here today and then enable us to execute on these newer, bigger missions yet to come.”
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