The Monarch System is a conceptual mission design hoping to provide the foundation for a highly reliable emergency communications system to support future Martian ground missions, following NASA’s current plans to carry out 6 manned missions to the red planet in the 2030s. This system will utilize the economic advantages of small satellites while emphasizing reliability through a design focused on redundancy. The Monarch System will provide a near-continuous line of communication from anywhere on the Martian surface to NASA through the Deep Space Network to improve operational communication and response capabilities. It is the goal of this project to address some of the infrastructure needed for humans to safely operate on Mars using existing or under-development technologies to create a system that is easy to implement, providing a pragmatic solution to this future need. These individual satellites will be engineered to maximize operational lifetime and communication capability. This project evaluates different aspects of the mission such as the constellation size and design, as well as the launch flexibility and cost competitiveness of the project, at its current stage being an attainable mission with 10 satellites and under a $2B budget for the 6 missions planned by NASA.

The group would like to thank faculty sponsor Raymond LeBeau for their support of this project.