I have a short story in which a Mars base is constantly transmitting Big Brother style footage to satellites in orbit around Mars and from there to satellites in orbit around Earth. At some point during the transmission I there will be a period of dead air as Earth passes behind the sun (from the Martian POV). My question is:
a) How long would that period of dead air last?
b) How often would it occur (my current guess is roughly every two earth years as per the alignment of Sun to Earth to Mars)?
c) Is there some obvious thing that makes this dead-air implausible? (I am assuming there are no other satellites picking up the transmission from other locations? I think relativity means the break would occur along with line of sight -- radio and light waves travelling the same speed. But this is not my background so are there any other quirks I should take into account. Gravitational lensing maybe?)
a) How long would that period of dead air last?
b) How often would it occur (my current guess is roughly every two earth years as per the alignment of Sun to Earth to Mars)?
c) Is there some obvious thing that makes this dead-air implausible? (I am assuming there are no other satellites picking up the transmission from other locations? I think relativity means the break would occur along with line of sight -- radio and light waves travelling the same speed. But this is not my background so are there any other quirks I should take into account. Gravitational lensing maybe?)