Communications infrastructure to support human activities on Mars. On to Mars—Colonizing a New World

support the exploration of Mars. Given the current political interpretation of the public’s willingness to support Mars missions, the Mars Network will probably fail to be fully implemented. However, the need for the Mars Network or some alternative to it will continue to grow. Rapid changes in technology are now occurring and we have more definitive concepts of our expected communication needs. Together, these give us the opportunity to refine and improve a proposed communication infrastructure to support human activities on Mars, better and at a lower cost. The human needs for communications support have equipment and situational aspects. The equipment aspects offer a close integration and interaction of storage, retrieval and computer facilities with communication facilities. The four main situational aspects are personal information exchanges, team collaborative interactions, entertainment, and routing. The communications facilities fortunately are benefitting from rapid current advances in technology. We can now provide wider bandwidth with most communications media at lower cost, and higher quality wireless capability in a wider range of coverage distances. While some of Earth’s spectrum limitations do not apply on Mars, Mars imposes is own physical limitations on communications. Also, we can now multiplex and compress messages better than before and make more use of digital communications technology. Finally, communications facilities will need to be extensible and reconfigurable on site to support human activities on Mars