[X] My Assistant

[monitorlizard]

Has NASA given any thought to sending a geosynchronous orbiting telecommunications spacecraft to Mars?
With Mars' rotation period just slightly over 24 hours, geosynchronous altitude would be only slightly
higher than the 22,000 miles it is for Earth. If you position it directly over, say, an MSL-type rover ten or
so years from now, you could have near-continuous high data rate transmission to Earth. Probably not
continuous because Mars would block transmission to Earth some of the time, but more than 12 hours
a day because of the altitude.

Admittedly, you couldn't do high-resolution orbital science with such a spacecraft, but you could
probably do some useful particles and fields measurtements. Yeah, you would need three or four such
spacecraft to cover all of Mars, but to start with, one spacecraft dedicated to one high data producing
rover would do.

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

The process by which a 4450-km altitude Sun-synchronous orbit (which requires a retrograde inclination of 130 degrees) was picked as the optimal orbit for the Mars Telecom Orbiter is described in http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstre...2/1/02-1120.pdf (at a time when Italy was still supposed to be involved in the project and it was therefore called the Marconi Orbiter).