Advanced Feature Extraction for Low-Bandwidth Mars Relay Links

Mars relay links force a compression decision most mapping teams never formalize. A feature-extraction quilt pipeline ships 12 KB bundles without losing geometry fidelity.

Mars relay links are the most expensive byte budget on any surface mission, and a cave-mapping payload cannot sidestep that constraint. The JPL DESCANSO record of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter telecommunications documents MRO downlink rates from 2 kb/s up to 2048 kb/s, and even the upper bound is shared across every instrument on every surface asset in the relay network. A 2 GB raw passive-acoustic session from a cave rover cannot ride a Mars relay — not even close — and the mission planning teams who work on relay scheduling have been explicit for years that the raw-data dream is never coming back.