In an innovative display of international cooperation, the European Space Agency helped to relay information from ESA’s Mars Express orbiter sent to it by China’s Zhurong Mars rover, back to the Chinese space agency. This was accomplished through a series of communication tests, reported Andrew Jones of Space.com. (https://www.space.com/china-mars-rover-communicates-via-european-orbiter)
The Chinese rover has powered through longer than its expected mission lifetime, and was designed to only communicate with its companion orbiter, Tianwen 1. However, the orbiter is gradually losing its ability to continue relaying large amounts of data.
So, China and Europe decided to conduct an experiment to see if the data could be relayed by the Mars Express. This was particularly challenging because although the Mars Express can receive the data from Zhurong, the rover can’t receive any messages in return, due to the differences in the communication equipment and the transmission frequency.
“On Nov. 20, Mars Express passed 2,500 miles (4,000 km) above Zhurong’s location in Utopia Planitia, received a batch of data, then transmitted the data across 230 million miles (370 million km) of space to European Space Operations Center ground stations, which then forwarded the data to the Beijing Aerospace Flight Control Center.
“`Mars Express successfully received the signals sent by the rover, and our colleagues in the Zhurong team confirmed that all the data arrived on Earth in very good quality,’ Gerhard Billig, a systems engineer at the European Space Agency, said in a statement.”
Existing agreements between the ESA and China allowed for a series of tests, both in November and those planned for the future. But, an ESA spokesman cautioned that a future arrangement for this kind of communication relay would have to be formalized in any new agreement.
