A Through-Ice and Ocean Acoustic Relay Network for Europa: Link Budgets, Hop Spacing and Data-Rate Budget

The system named in the title is developed here as a worked design, derived from the physics of its operating environment and reported throughout as SIMULATED, NOT MEASURED. The network is civilian scientific infrastructure: it carries data and commands between ocean instruments, the ice shell and the surface station for peaceful oceanographic research. The deposited computation script produces every number in the paper from stated inputs; among its results are ocean hop margin of 24.1 decibels, ice hop margin of 30.7 decibels and science channel rate of 2400 bits per second. The study assembles component budgets for mass and power, examines how the design behaves away from its design point, and closes with an explicit statement of what the sizing does not establish.