Re:Mars to Earth at an average of 29 kbits/s
by danielweber on Friday August 10, 2012 @04:57PM
(#4368215)
As someone explained to me on another thread, the orbiters they have now are in polar orbits. A more equatorial orbit would create very frequent uplinks.
One thing is that they didn't know Gale Crater was where they were going to land until pretty soon before launch. There were a number of other sites. And if they chose one further from the equator, that satellite wouldn't necessarily be in the right place.
The current orbiters are primarily for imaging, so it makes sense that they're as low as possible. If you were always going to have several surface missions, it might make sense to have higher orbiters primarily tasked with communication relay.