Tracking a spacecraft as it travels through space is fundamentally a problem of measuring time, we cant just pull out a ruler and measure how far away our spacecraft is. So instead, we measure how long it takes for the spacecraft to echo back a radio signal that is sent from Earth.

Jill Seubert

Categorized in : Science

All of those spacecraft that are at Mars right now need to share tracking time with the Deep Space Network, theyre time-sharing essentially.

Just imagine an astronaut hiking on Mars, and maybe Olympus Mons is rising in the background, shes checking her Google Maps Mars Edition to see where she is and chart a course to get where she needs to go.

Every single spacecraft exploring deep space today relies on navigation thats performed back here at Earth to tell it where it is and, much more importantly, where its going, we have to navigate from Earth because the clocks onboard spacecraft are really not good at accurately measuring time, but if we can change that, we can revolutionize the way that we can navigate deep space.

What this means is that you can essentially support an infinite number of spacecraft going to or around Mars with this architecture.