A spacecraft scheduled to launch to Mars in 2009 and designed to pioneer the use of interplanetary laser communication has been cancelled by NASA for budgetary reasons. The agency will now have to rely on other satellites to relay data from future Martian landers to Earth.
The Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (MTO) was to be the first satellite to use a laser to beam its data from the Red Planet to Earth - sending the data at a rate of least 10 times that of current radio links.
But the spacecraft was primarily designed to test communications technology and not conduct science experiments. That made it "the thing that had to go" in an effort to cut costs, says Andy Dantzler, director of NASA's solar system division.
"It's obviously a painful decision," he told the Rocky Mountain News. "We cancelled MTO because we simply don't have the money in the future budget to support it."
MTO would have beamed back between 1 million and 30 million bits of data per second, depending on the distance between Mars and Earth. That compares with the current highest data transmission rate of 128,000 bits per second from NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft.
That leap in capacity is due to the different wavelengths of radiation carrying the data. The laser will use infrared light with a wavelength of 1.06 microns, which is thousands of times shorter than radio waves. Since all light travels at the same speed through space, shorter wavelengths can carry more information in the same time.
The $500 million MTO is based largely on the design of the agency's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), due to launch on 10 August 2005. Now, the agency will have to use MRO - which does not carry a laser - to send data from future landers such as the Mars Science Laboratory to Earth. But MRO will be able to beam back 10 times more information per minute than any other Mars probe as it will carry the largest communications antenna ever flown to Mars.
NASA officials are confident that MRO is up to the task. “We can get all the data from Mars Science Laboratory back without [MTO],” says Doug McCuiston, NASA's Mars Exploration programme manager.
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18:53 05 September 2008
