Australian technology to provide live video link to Mars

NASA has announced that CSIRO research scientist Dr John Bunton is to receive a NASA Space Act Board Award for research into the development of a novel ‘beamformer’ capable of providing a live video link from Mars.

Bunton has developed a design for the ‘Deep Space Array Based Network Beamformer‘.

Bunton said NASA required a live video link from Mars for its planned future manned mission; however, the current Deep Space Network does not have enough ‘sensitivity’ for the task, even with its 70 m antenna.

“One solution is to employ a large antenna array, possibly with 400, 12 m antennas, but this solution requires data from all antennas to be added together in a very precise manner,” Bunton said.

In Bunton’s design, the video signal data is divided into narrow channels and transported to beamformer boards.

Each board sums the narrow channel data from all 400 antennas. This data can then be reconstructed back into a broadband signal.

A prototype system based on the frequency domain beamformer has been built and shown to work on signals from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft mission to Saturn.

The research is also important to the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder project and has other potential applications in space communications and earth sensing.