For those like me who love the technical aspects of all this - I've been digging around a bit, and currently (or recently) - spacecraft are using the following DTE bitrates

MEX - 104857.6 bps
Genesis - 16590 bps and 47400 bps
MGS - 42666.7 bps and 8000 bps
MER Cruise - 2212 bps and 7110 bps (via MGA)
MODY - 124425 bps and 39816 bps

In the case of two values - it is likely that the smaller value is using a 35m DSN dish, and the larger a 70m DSN dish.

For info on MER UHF passes in the future - check out some ENORMOUS stats - http://mgsw3.jpl.nasa.gov/seq/relay/srpr/0...S00.apgen.notes

April 1st was D.o.Y 91 - so these are April 20th and beyond -

I believe 32 degrees elevation is the limit at which they'll do a 256kbps pass instead of a 128 kbps pass - but these stats confirmed what I thought - that the average sol will include 100 - 300 mbits of relay data - with as much as 158 mbits in a single pass and up to 4 passes per sol - but short passes are ignored as the downtime of operations to get the small ammount of data back doesn justify the interuption to MER and MODY ops.

Doug

Next year MRO will blow all those away with its 4.4 Mbps download (70m DSN) - enough for live TV from Mars

Oh hell yes - MRO will be fantastic - but remember, that 4Mbits/sec is only for some of the time - it will vary betwen 280 and 4400 kbps depending on the mars-earth distance - and that peak rate is for only a few months around closest approach.

I found a PDF or PPT some time ago that showed bitrate over time for 35 and 70m dsn dishes, but sods law dictates I can no longer find it

Doug