For example, if I was on a rocket to mars and transmitting a video stream back to earth non-stop for the duration of the journey…
At the begining when I am leaving earth, the lag between me transmitting the video and earth recieving it would be basically nothing. But by the time I get to mars there is a delay of 3 minutes or whatever between send and recieve.
What happens to the video during the journey? Do some frames randomly drop? Does the video have to buffer constantly? Is there an incremental decrease in quality over time?
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Let’s say you start broadcasting on the launch pad and never stop until you get to mars, the receiver would receive the signal seamlessly. I will caveat, this excludes any orbital blackouts where the signal gets blocked, and ignores signal strengths falling off.
It takes the rocket longer to get to mars than the signal to get to earth. If you’re having a conversation, that is different because you are waiting for a response which means you have to wait for the message to get there and the messages to get back.
Yes there would be signal degradation over the distance. To what extent I don’t know off the top of my head. It depends what redundancy you have in the signals to make the full picture though.
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