My Little Pony: My Little Pony The Martian

AMICITAS Mission Three – Mission Day 49

ARES 3 solar day 52

Transcript – Hydraulic Telegraph Switch – ESA Maltimore Center ＜-＞ ESA spacecraft AMICITAS

AMICITAS: Amicitas calls Maltimore, uses the starlight space suit to reply, completed.

ESA: Maltimore calls Amicitas, request received, communication via Starlight space suit, completed.

AMICITAS: Dragonflies - All crops planted. The aliens plan to use the ship's radio to try to contact their home planet. Request to try communication experiment a plan and communication experiment gamma plan again. complete.

ESA: Please wait, over.

ESA: Preparation for communication experiment gamma plan, completed.

AMICITAS: Dragonfly - ready to start communication experiment gamma plan, completed.

AMICITAS: Dragonfly - Communication Experiment γ Program Ended. No radio reply received. complete.

ESA: Confirmation that the radio connection was not successful and the signal could not be received. complete.

AMICITAS: Dragonfly - Preparing for communication experiment plan a, completed.

ESA: We have determined that Plan A of the communication experiment is not feasible. It is calculated that the mana energy required for your connection will exceed the energy supply capacity, over.

AMICITAS: Dragonfly - received. Is there any other way? complete.

ESA: Please confirm whether you have sufficient sources of enchantable crystals? complete.

AMICITAS: Confirmed possession of large quantities of quartz and similar crystals, completed.

ESA: Be prepared to receive a long message tomorrow regarding the precautions for crystal replacement of the communication system's transmission magic array.

AMICITAS: Copied, confirmed that we will receive communication system modification related messages tomorrow. How about twenty-five hours from now? complete.

ESA: Scheduled receipt twenty-five hours after confirmation. Let the aliens try using non-magically powered radio systems first. Communication ends.

Mission Log – Solar Day 55

I just put the pony's radio system back together for the last time. I'm sure every part is in its place, but the device is now considered dispensable to me.

The last four solar days have been really rough. It all starts with a conversation I had with Tingting about their communication methods. The pony ship's main communications system is powered by magic, and even though they've tried to fix it several times, it still doesn't work. (They are planning to replace the magic radio with a new crystal core, but that will have to wait until Spitfire lifts the ban on Starlight's magic. She hasn't had a light on her horn for nine days.) They do have a regular set, though. A radio system that relies purely on electromagnetic principles is used as a backup in emergencies. Tingting also showed me some relevant technical parameters.

Xiaoma's radio system is of the FM frequency modulation standard and uses an integrated transceiver antenna. The antenna is hidden just under the skin on top of the ship's cockpit, so it's not too hard to reach if Fireball helps me out. Wouldn't that be convenient? I just need to take off that thing, connect it to the radio system in the residential area, and relay it through an orbiting satellite above my head to contact NASA, right?

But... no, it's not that simple. Radio systems in residential areas are not broadband. It can only send and receive X-band microwaves, and Xiaoma's antenna was not designed with this use in mind. In any case, after all, I am now a dead horse and a living horse doctor, so I still tried my best. I probably tried dozens of different adjustments while trying not to accidentally damage the residential radio system or blow out the antenna. I even tried to install the antenna and then sit and wait for a day, hoping that the computer in the residential area would actively connect to an orbiting satellite, even if it was just for a while. Of course this didn't happen. The differences between the devices are simply too great to be compatible. If I hand-made a transmitter from scratch, the situation might be better than this.

So I put the Pony antenna back on the ship, planning to use their radio directly. Unfortunately, even if you do this, you still run into several problems.

The first problem is that Pony's radios are entirely analog circuit devices. It is only used as a backup voice communication system, not for communication between the spacecraft's onboard computer and the ground computer. I actually took apart the radio device with the help of Tingting. It was just like the radio station that Gilligan and his friends used to pay attention to the trends in the outside world. There were no integrated circuits or chips at all - just A lot of old-fashioned giant transistors, resistors, capacitors, etc. are all colored and look very similar to these types of components on Earth.

It sounds like there's nothing wrong with it, but here's the problem. This means that the pony's radio is completely incompatible with all systems in the residential area. All communication equipment used in the Ares 3 project is digital. There is no other way, because even FM analog voice communication requires a huge amount of energy that far exceeds the maximum energy supply limit in residential areas to effectively transmit the signal back to the earth. Digital signals are just "0s" and "1s" — fully on or fully off — so reception is much easier.

Even with digital communications, sending signals back and forth is not easy. One of the reasons why the residential area is equipped with a giant directional antenna dish and a very large antenna array is to enable broadband data transmission between Earth and Mars. Even when Earth and Fire are at their closest distance, and we are facing the Earth, the distance between the two planets will still severely weaken the signal strength; and the weaker the signal received, the slower the data transmission speed.

Forget it, the kind of continuous live video you can see from the space station is impossible. Even recorded video messages consume a staggering amount of bandwidth, so NASA has restricted the sending and receiving of such content. Voice communication is reserved only for the mission control center's supervision of flight control operations. After all, even digitally processed audio consumes a lot of bandwidth. Most of the time we are encouraged to use text files like this blog post to transfer information whenever possible, because ASCII-formatted text documents put less pressure on bandwidth to transfer.

So how serious is this restriction? Well, here's an example. For example, Curiosity doesn't have a huge communications dish or antenna array—it only has three small antennas that occasionally connect to satellites overhead. The maximum data transmission rate for direct communication with the earth is only 32Kbps - even transmitting real-time audio is difficult. At the furthest distance from the earth, the transmission speed will drop all the way to 0.5Kbps. That's why Curiosity mostly communicates with orbiting satellites that operate more powerfully and have better transmitters. But even with the relay of orbiting satellites, if you want to use this kind of network connection to watch Twitch live broadcast, the video buffering time will be longer than the time you actually watch the video.

And don’t forget, Mars’ orbiting satellites all use digital communication systems. Even if they receive an analog signal, they won't know what to do with it.

The above is the first question. The second problem is actually more important: Xiaoma's radio device is designed to only send and receive five fixed channels, with frequencies between 86 MHz and 109 MHz. That is, the signal it transmits falls within a frequency range used by most commercial FM stations on Earth. Unless all of NASA's radio telescopes are pointed at this spot on Mars, our signal will be drowned out by a large number of local broadcast stations.

I have tried to solve this problem. I took the entire radio apart, carefully checked it against the wiring diagram I had (which was of no help - the components all looked the same, but the symbols on the diagram except for the wires were all different from the Earth version), twisted I racked my brains to see if there was any way to rewire the device without permanently damaging the circuitry. But in the end I still got nothing.

So now everything is back in its place. I'm pretty sure Pony's radio does work from some angles. But it is of no practical use to me at the moment, unless I can contact NASA one day and transform this device into a backup communication method under their guidance.

It's like using a key locked in a safe to unlock the safe.

Bottom line: I couldn't build a radio with the resources I had at hand that could communicate with any satellite in orbit, let alone communicate directly with Earth. And the only way I could establish communication with Earth was to go out and buy a new radio.

...Wait a minute, maybe this idea is not as silly as it sounds.

Let me look at the map first. The ponies' language lessons will have to be delayed for a few more minutes.