THE interplanetary information superhighway is heading for gridlock. The sort of uncongested communications that we now take for granted on Earth are an unheard-of luxury in space, as NASA's decades-old network of dishes and relays struggles with spiralling traffic from dozens of space missions.
The need for an upgrade is becoming urgent with the advent of a new generation of spacecraft carrying powerful cameras. They will soon begin transmitting images of the worlds they explore in unprecedented detail.
While these new probes are great news for planetary scientists, transmitting high-resolution images back to Earth will put increasing strain on NASA's 40-year-old Deep Space Network (DSN). This global array of listening and transmitting stations is the lifeline for nearly all the agency's spacecraft plus a host of international satellites operating at high-altitude Earth orbit and beyond.
The first of the new generation of bandwidth-hungry explorers is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. MRO, ...
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