According to a report in the Times Higher Education Supplement, NASA plans to wire the Solar System by creating a network of spacecraft. These are designed to provide a communications and navigation infrastructure for future explorers, whether humans, as on the Apollo missions, or robots like Pathfinder. The first stage is a constellation of six satellites to provide something like a global positioning system on the surface of Mars. These satellites will also be required to act as communications relays for low-powered signals – a difficult engineering trade-off, since the optimal orbit for a GPS satellite is quite different from the optimal orbit for a relay. Nevertheless, the team from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs which is racing to line up specs and funding for a 2003 launch, believes the satellites could be built and deployed for as little as $50m each. Anyone for a .mars domain?
