The 2009 Mars telecom orbiter mission

This paper provides an overview of the Mars telecom orbiter (MTO) mission, and is an update to the paper presented at last year´s conference. Launched in 2009, MTO provides Mars-to-Earth relay services for NASA missions arriving at Mars between 2010 and 2020, enabling far higher science data return and lowering the telecom and operations costs for these missions. MTO carries an optical communications payload, which demonstrates downlink bit rates from 1 Mbps up to and possibly exceeding 30 Mbps. MTO also demonstrates the ability to autonomously navigate, and to search for and rendezvous with an orbiting sample, in preparation for NASA´s proposed Mars sample return mission. A to-be-defined science instrument is also carried.