Mars Exploration Oriented Design and Simulation of Relay Communication

Abstract

In the deep space communication, traditional point-to-point communication system would no longer meet the requirements of long-distance information transmission and Mars exploration will mainly use the way of relay communication to transmit scientific exploratory data. On the basis of analyzing link visibility and link distance of on-orbit relay satellite, this paper proposes a new way of relay communication which can provide longer visible time and the capacity to cover Mars probe uniformly. The link visibility and link distance of the two relay communication way are simulated by STK, and the link performance of through link and the two relay way is simulated. The simulation results show that the relay constellation scheme which cover Mars probe uniformly reach higher performance in the link visibility and link coverage. Otherwise, the SNR of relay link can get 3 dB performance improvement. Compared with through link, relay constellation scheme that cover Mars probe uniformly can link performance based on obviously improving link visibility, which can be better applied to future Mars exploration.