[OnACoffeeBreak]

Good question. I imagine that communication infrastructure would have to be taken into consideration, but I don't know much of the details. The rover has the following capabilities for comms, but I don't know what the limits are in Mars orbit for relays:

- UHF up to 2 Mbps

- X-band High Gain 160/500 bits per second

- X-band Low Gain about 10 bits per second

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/rover/communicatio...

[basementcat]

There are allocations from the International Telecommunication Union for deep space communications in the S, X, K and Ka bands. This bandwidth (and parameters like transmit power of the relay spacecraft) effectively bounds how many bits per second you can get back from Mars. You can do better with optical communications and maybe some clever MIMO-like tricks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_space_bands

[JumpCrisscross]

How do we communicate with the rovers when Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the Sun?

[ckozlowski]

Sounds like it doesn't last all that long. They have a keep-alive program running during, and then get back to work once the connection is restored:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/learn/video/mars-in-a-minute-wh...

[jbay808]

Relay the lasers at a Lagrange point somewhere?