It's not bad seeing as Mars is 225 million to 401 million Km away depending on where it is in its orbit.

46 Light Minutes is pretty much the maximum, that's 827,427,184 Kilometers round trip which is a bit beyond the maximum distance to Mars so there's some processing delays thrown in there.

We can't really get rid of the latency but we can increase the bandwidth by throwing a bunch of higher-power communication satellites on Mars.

We can certainly push more data from Mars, but the entire point of the article is that we probably won't have the bandwidth to receive it.

Unless we can convince congress and NASA execs to increase the budget and get more dishes built pronto.

Yep. We could cover Mar's sky with something similar to SpaceX's Starlink (high availability from any location on Mars) but with large data buffers and transmission systems that can pump the goods all the back to Earth.

Three geostationary satellites should do fine for the number of data consumers on Mars.

Except for anything at the pole.

But the problem remains the link from Mars to earth, not from the surface to orbit.

s/geostationary/areostationary

Nah I don't want to. "Geo" is used generically often enough and I'd rather use a generic term than a mars-specific term.

NAME Voyager 2

RANGE 20.00 billion km

ROUND-TRIP LIGHT TIME 1.54 days

DATA RATE 160.0 b/sec

Amazing.