Mars Satellite Architecture

Premise

Mars is about to get a lot busier. NASA's Mars Sample Return campaign, ESA's ExoMars rover, commercial landers, and a long tail of academic smallsats are all converging on a four-year window with essentially no dedicated orbital infrastructure to support them. Telemetry today still hitches a ride on whatever happens to be overhead — MRO, MAVEN, TGO — assets engineered for science, not for relay-as-a-service.

This study takes the inverse stance: design the orbital infrastructure first, sell the services to the missions, and treat the science as the side effect. The thesis is that a small, fast, deliberately bus-agnostic program can deliver useful Mars infrastructure on a faster and cheaper timeline than the current programs of record.

Architecture

A single mothership performs the Earth → Mars transfer and hosts an areostationary relay node from a stable equatorial orbit. Three smallsats deploy after aerobraking into complementary orbits chosen for coverage, not science:

Mothership

Areostationary relay

Smallsat 1

Sun-sync imaging

Smallsat 2

Polar weather / dust

Smallsat 3

Drifter / opportunity

The study is deliberately bus-agnostic. The architecture is sized against a range of commercial mothership options rather than tied to any single provider, so the trade closes (or doesn't) on its own merits. The questions driving the work are uncomfortably simple: does the mass budget close for a four-payload Mars injection across realistic bus choices; does aerobraking shave enough Δv to make smallsat ADCS realistic on commercial buses; and does the relay arc pay back its own mass in deferred ground-station cost across a realistic customer manifest.

Explore the buildout

The simulator below is a player of derived trajectories, not a hand-tuned animation — every spacecraft position is computed from the same orbital mechanics that back the study. Scrub the 2026–2050 timeline to watch the mothership transfer, aerobrake, and deploy its smallsats; switch between the heliocentric view and planet-centric views (Mercury through Saturn, with moons) to see the real fleet already on station alongside the proposed constellation.

Frame model

IAU-2015 orientation · validated vs SPICE

Dynamics

Edelbaum low-thrust · J2 secular · aerobrake decay

Views

Heliocentric + 8 planet-centric (with moons)

Real fleet

BepiColombo · Akatsuki · 7 Mars orbiters · Clipper · JUICE

Timeline

2026 – 2050

Stack

Static HTML · ES modules · Three.js

Current state

This is internal working-level trade-study material, not a funded program. The repository contains the executive summary, the architecture trade study, orbit + Δv + mass + power + link budgets, a Python modeling toolchain (Hohmann transfers, aerobraking, SPICE kernel integration), and a multi-mission roadmap through 2034.

The numbers close across the studied bus options. The business case clears at a defensible steady-state revenue against the aggregate investment — defensible internally, not yet against any specific customer commitment.

What's next

Two open threads. First, sharpen the customer story: identify three named missions whose mission-control cost falls measurably when relay coverage exists, and quantify the savings. Second, harden the bus-trade matrix so the architecture stays robust against whichever commercial mothership options actually become available in the launch window.