While I'm thinking about it...
May. 28th, 2007 10:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpWatching the preparations for the upcoming EVA today, I was struck by the following conundrum:
Assuming humans ever get their act together sufficiently to send an expedition to Mars, one of the issues that will have to be faced will be that of increasingly longer delays in communication owing to the increasingly larger distance between Earth and the expedition vehicle as the vehicle approaches Mars.
Given this circumstance, and assuming standard, off-the-shelf gear to make, process, and send a continuous video signal from the expedition vehicle to the Earth during the outbound phase of the mission, and since the speed of electromagnetic radiation (the transmission) is axiomatically constant for both the transmitter and receiver, my question is this:
How would the increasing lag be reflected in the received video signal?
I can see where the signal would exhibit a red shift, in accordance with what I barely remember of relativity theory, but what mechanism would account for any perceived change in the delay time?
And why does this pop up in my mind now?
Cheers...
Assuming humans ever get their act together sufficiently to send an expedition to Mars, one of the issues that will have to be faced will be that of increasingly longer delays in communication owing to the increasingly larger distance between Earth and the expedition vehicle as the vehicle approaches Mars.
Given this circumstance, and assuming standard, off-the-shelf gear to make, process, and send a continuous video signal from the expedition vehicle to the Earth during the outbound phase of the mission, and since the speed of electromagnetic radiation (the transmission) is axiomatically constant for both the transmitter and receiver, my question is this:
How would the increasing lag be reflected in the received video signal?
I can see where the signal would exhibit a red shift, in accordance with what I barely remember of relativity theory, but what mechanism would account for any perceived change in the delay time?
And why does this pop up in my mind now?
Cheers...
