Posted 11/12/2018

The updated mission profile includes a relay station either on the moon Phobos or else orbiting around it.

For testing purposes, I have used a WIFI router that has on board ports for USB/eSATA and provides FTP file transfer to simulate the Phobos Relay Station. This station would accept uploads from the surface balloon and then transfer the files from local storage to Earth when the alignment is correct.

Here are the features of the device:

This router allows you share all or part of an attached USB device. For testing purposes I used a USB flash drive formatted with FAT and this worked fine. I did have to setup an account and login from FTP. It is possible to use anonymous FTP but for security this is probably a bad idea.

I have tested this function to upload and download files using Filezilla as an FTP client. Further testing will use a command line and eventually run from a single board such as a Raspberry Pi Zero/W or similar machine.

A Phobos Relay Station using this class of hardware should have enough processing power to receive, buffer and then re-transmit the signal to Earth.