Phobos Anchor Relay

Outposts on the far side of Mars lose line-of-sight to the Olympus Ring for hours each sol. Phobos Anchor solves that by flying co-orbital with the moon Phobos, 6,000 km above the surface, and relaying traffic between surface stations, orbiting ships and the Lantern network back toward L5.

The relay carries both radio and laser terminals and schedules uplink slots automatically, giving priority to medical and safety traffic. Polaris Relay Tenders based at the Olympus Ring service it every year, and a 2186 upgrade doubled its throughput to 12 gigabits per second.

Link availability reports and schedule statistics are published openly. Mining partners operating in the southern highlands use the reports to plan when their crews can transmit bulk survey data.

The relay has no public code repository, but feedback on the scheduling policy is welcome through the open data forum. Current products include mars far-side relay, surface uplink scheduling and link availability reports. Everything is distributed under the CC-BY-4.0 licence, and the open data team answers questions on the community forum within two working days. Partners who build commercial services on top of it are asked only to credit Halcyon Stellar Works and to report errors they find, so that every user benefits from the fix.