How does the communication architecture prioritize data return volume and system redundancy?
By maintaining the UHF relay system's operational capacity even if the HGA is temporarily offline or misaligned.
The communication architecture reveals a key engineering tradeoff where power conservation and high data return are prioritized, even if it means accepting scheduling inflexibility. This is achieved by ensuring redundancy in daily operational status updates. The UHF relay system is kept functional to guarantee that essential command uploads and daily status updates are not jeopardized by orbital alignments or momentary power fluctuations. This distributed approach means that even if an orbiter pass is missed or the HGA is pointed elsewhere, essential communication functions can fall back onto the robust UHF relay infrastructure, provided the rover has sufficient onboard storage capacity.

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