High-Level Project Summary
NASA's space communications and navigation (SCaN) program enables this data exchange, wheather it's with astronauts aborad the international space station, rovers on Mars, are the Artemis missions to the moon.
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Detailed Project Description
Communicating to and from space is a challenging endeavor . fortunately,NASA has the the experience and expertise to get space data to the ground.
There are seven stages
1.THE BASICS
The At its simplest, space communications relies on two things: a transmitter and a receiver. A transmitter encodes a message onto electromagnetic waves through modulation, which changes properties of the wave to represent the data. These waves flow through space toward the receiver. The receiver collects the electromagnetic waves and demodulates them, decoding the sender’s message.
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2. GROUND NETWORKS
Communicating from space involves more than pointing a spacecraft’s antenna at the Earth. NASA has an extensive network of antennas around the globe — over all seven continents — to receive transmissions from spacecraft.
3. SPACE RELAYS
In addition to direct-to-Earth communications, many NASA missions rely on relay satellites in order to get their data to the ground. For example, the space station communicates through Tracking and Data Relay Satellites (TDRS).
Hackathon Journey
4.. BANDWIDTH
NASA encodes data on various bands of electromagnetic frequencies. These bandwidths — ranges of frequencies — have different capabilities. Higher bandwidths can carry more data per second, allowing spacecraft to downlink data more quickly.
5. DATA RATES
Higher bandwidths can mean higher data rates for missions. Apollo radios sent grainy black and white video from the Moon. An upcoming optical terminal on the Artemis II mission will send 4K, ultra-high definition video from lunar orbit.
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6. LATENCY
Communications don’t occur instantaneously. They’re bound by a universal speed limit: the speed of light, about 186,000 miles per second. For spacecraft close to Earth, this time delay — or communications latency — is almost negligible.
7. INTERFERENCE
As communications transmissions travel over long distances or through the atmosphere, the quality of their data can deteriorate, garbling the message. Radiation from other missions, the Sun, or other celestial bodies can also interfere with the quality of transmissions.