This thought came up while following Oppy's current approach to Victoria, which will apparently be interrupted by the superior conjunction of Mars next month. What if we had some relay comsats out at the Earth/Sun L4 & L5 points? This would provide uninterrupted communication between the DSN and ANY spacecraft throughout the entire solar system.
Certainly it would be hard to justify such missions if their only purpose was to provide that function alone, but consider this: The solar Trojan relay comsats could link to terrestrial comsats and/or dedicated ground stations thus freeing up the rest of the DSN for dedicated, mission-critical taskings and hopefully minimizing trade-offs in antenna availability between missions. What I'm thinking of here is more of a networked capability rather than resource sharing, if that makes sense...something like TDRSS for UMSF.
Come to that, there's also an opportunity (ta-da, da!
) to strap on some scientific payloads to such Trojan comsats...maybe we could have two SOHO replacements as well as relay stations, or maybe a mini-Spitzer, or a gamma-ray observatory, or...well, you get the idea. Lots of bang for the buck potential here.Okay, that was my shtick. Fire at will!
