NASA to examine commercializing Mars communication relays

Today, NASA announced that it's issuing a Request for Information that seeks parties, either academic or commercial, who are willing to set up a communications relay orbiting Mars. Should the agency like the information it gets, it could extend its current fee-for-service approach well beyond Earth's orbit.

Because of weight and power restrictions, the hardware that we've landed on Mars can't carry high-bandwidth communication devices that can reach Earth (it does, however, carry lower-bandwidth hardware that can establish a direct connection). Instead, missions like the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has its own science instruments, also carry communications hardware that lets them receive high volumes of data from the planet's surface and quickly send it back to Earth.

MRO is the most recent hardware that serves this purpose, but it's already nearly a decade old; Odyssey, its fellow relay, is even older. Fortunately, the MAVEN mission, which arrives this year, will also have relay capabilities, as will the ESA's ExoMars orbiter, which should arrive in 2016.