Abstract The future of deep space communications encompasses a challenging situation where the current facilities used to communicate with different spacecraft may become saturated as a result of an increasing number of missions and their complexity. From this forecast, the present study intends to provide a solution to saturation problems through strategically-located upgradable relays for Earth–Mars communications. The foremost goal of this paper is to quantitatively uncover the potential enhancements coming from relay placement in strategic orbits between Earth and Mars. Herein, two relay configurations – a.k.a. network topologies – are analyzed: the Lagrange-relays network topology and a circular, homogeneously-distributed satellite constellation, acknowledged here as pearl constellation. The first uses the Earth–Sun system Lagrange points L3, L4 and L5 as potential locations for the relays, whilst the second defines an optimized orbit between Earth and Mars with 3 or 4 relay satellites. To aid in the analysis, the authors developed an open-sourced piece of software that obtains the link availability as well as the data rate at which two nodes may communicate, taking as a reference the Deep Space Network (DSN) for Earth, and the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for Mars. For complex topologies with more than two communicating nodes, the software outputs the end-to-end bit rate and optimal communication route at each time step. Moreover, this product is extensible to analyze and optimize any network topology and could be adapted to be used for contact management and mission planning in the future. The results show that the network-topology proposals are an advantageous option to significantly increase the link availability of Earth–Mars communications. Nevertheless, the Direct-To-Earth (DTE) link always outperforms the multi-hop path due to the limited telecommunication system’s capabilities of both the spacecraft and the relays. As a result of this, the study includes an analysis on the requirements of the relay’s design in order to make the constellation a beneficial and comparable alternative to the DTE link. This way, the proposed network topologies become a suitable option whom to share with the DSN communications workload, providing enhanced bit rates and data volumes as well as higher availability of the communication.

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Highlights • Deep space relays in strategic orbits help to improve Earth–Mars communications. • Solar conjunctions may be successfully avoided through relays. • Communication availability is significantly improved; up to continuous visibility. • Reasonable gain enhancements could lead to bit rates comparable to the current ones. • Total downlink data volume could be tripled.