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JoeAltmaier parent
It's all about bandwidth. Pictures are nice but command and control are vital, so more bandwidth is given over to that.

The bandwidth depends upon the power levels, antenna size, signal strength and the noise level. See the Shannon-Hartley theorem for details.

This means from a small lander on the moon all the way back to earth the bandwidth is small. Sure put a big camera on there, but it'll take weeks to send one picture in its entirety. The Indian lander only has like 2 weeks of life total.


croutonwagon
Sure but I would assume they would eventually have some type of relay, like lunar gateway. Allow the landers to sip power and send to the relay, probably more a series of satellites in more eccentric orbits, and let those use their bigger solar panels and higher power to transmit/recieve back to ground stations.

I mean, how would we communicate with Mars colonies when the earth and mars are at opposite sides of the sun without some series of satellites in a elliptical orbit possibly at angle perpendicular to our general orbital planes?

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