Time to set up a GPS constellation on Mars? Somehow forgot that this navigation aid -- that we take for granted on Earth -- is missing on this other planet.
The GPS constellation has 32 satellites. A GPS satellite weighs ~2000kg. Starship should get 100-150 tons to Mars - the math checks out! (Disclosure: I got all my rocket science from sending Kerbals to their doom.)
So, MPS for Mars, LPS for Luna? Just imagine the amount and quality of rover footage we could get if each of them had (constant!) 1Gbps uplink to Earth...
Sure, our ancestors (who could make their way and thrive in the wild) would probably consider me (who gets lost the moment I make a wrong right turn and depends on the local supermarket) a complete idiot, especially since I couldn't recreate any of the technology my daily life so depends on... But I've got central heating and clean tap-water, so I'm happy with the exchange.
The higher we climb the ladder of technological dependency, the more calamitous it becomes should we ever fall off. Best not to look down. (I think I'm supposed to bang rocks together to make fire, right?)
Won't work very well unless you have flint specifically :-) Even if you know the techniques, starting fire without any manufactured tools or manufactured tools to make the devices is really really hard.
You're right that it's possible, but how long it takes, and whether or not you can do it, are dependent on skill and environment. Wrong kind of wood? Screwed. Been raining for a day? Screwed. Sometimes this can be overcome, but you have to know what you're doing, and it can still take hours to generate enough heat to dry the wood until it's possible to friction combust it. Try it sometime, just bring a lighter with you.
But friction methods are tough, even if you have a well-made spindle and fireboard--which of course require tools. You're not easily creating those without tools to make those tools. And, even then, it's not super easy especially in a non-optimum environment.
I wonder what the “useful minimum” for satellites would be if you wanted, say, relatively accurate positioning once every orbit or each day.
Almost all of the technologies that we would need for survival and productivity on Mars are recently-invented.
No kingdoms offered huge prizes for the first electric light, or the first antibiotic, the first radio, or the first computer. But geolocation has always been considered a big deal, and it arguably wasn't well and truly solved until the advent of satellite navigation. It'd be surprising if it weren't being planned for the next generation of Mars orbiters.
atomic clocks
Not an expert, but the whole network is on communication (with perfect understanding of the satellites locations no less), shouldn't they be able to run an ntpd like protocol to stay in sync, and just sync ground clocks to "starling consensus time" instead of "real time".
I'm also not an expert so I don't know if you can solve it with syncing. Maybe you can. But that doesn't sound like a "just" concept to me - any solution to this is going to be complicated.
That would be really cool, I wonder if it would be faster and more precise because there would be negligible human-produced radio noise to interfere and the Martian ionosphere is much thinner, or if it would be worse because the thinner and weaker atmosphere and magnetic field don't protect the receivers from solar noise.
I wonder if a rover could drop a few beacons for time-of-flight 2D triangulation, it's not like they're moving hundreds of miles away over the horizon.
I imagine it’s possible to set up a ground-based network, but you would need a high density to cover large surfaces (you want to see at least four stations from every position). I also imagine that it would be difficult to get accurate vertical positions if the stations are all in the same horizontal plane.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_kinematic_positionin...
Before GPS LORAN [1] and it's versions was used relying on ground stations