Data comes from Perseverance through two channels:
* A low-bandwidth direct link to Earth (160bps-800bps depending on receiver dish- no, that's not a typo)
* A high-bandwidth link to orbiting satellites, which then forward traffic to Earth (~2Mbps for the rover->orbit hop, anywhere from 0.5-4Mbps for the orbit->Earth) .
I strongly suspect that the low-bandwidth telemetry signals - equivalent to the homemade reception from satellites I've heard of - are sent in the clear. Bandwidth is just too precious to waste.
I would not be surprised either way for the image data - on the one hand, computing power is relatively scarce, while on the other hand it already has to go through a compression pipeline.
* A low-bandwidth direct link to Earth (160bps-800bps depending on receiver dish- no, that's not a typo)
* A high-bandwidth link to orbiting satellites, which then forward traffic to Earth (~2Mbps for the rover->orbit hop, anywhere from 0.5-4Mbps for the orbit->Earth) .
I strongly suspect that the low-bandwidth telemetry signals - equivalent to the homemade reception from satellites I've heard of - are sent in the clear. Bandwidth is just too precious to waste.
I would not be surprised either way for the image data - on the one hand, computing power is relatively scarce, while on the other hand it already has to go through a compression pipeline.
https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/rover/communication/