Sunday, July 12, 2009

NASA Tests Space Internet


Many roads, the message on the Internet to create a strong and effective - and envy the people who work for the design of communication system at a distance to leave the spaceship Earth, so each year. After more than a decade, development, NASA has a run on the loans from the communication network, by 2011, the efficiency of data between Earth and a few probes, Rover, Orbit, spacecraft and exploration solar system - in fact authentic, for a cross-Internet. Tests to the International Space Station last May, the second of three tryouts key network technology, known as Delay Tolerant Network, or DTN, Minutes.

DTN newspaper, the Internet is in space by a series of obstacles to overcome, including the unusual length of time for packets between the various hops in the network, the intermittent nature of a network connection, Scrambling and a little sunlight.

"Communication is a very long delay, and they are variable, because the planets in orbit around the sun," said Vint Cerf, co-inventor of the Internet TCP / IP and the key to a group of computer The DTN work in 1998. In the ground, drag the package from source to destination in milliseconds. However, a simple course of the Earth to Mars takes at least 8 hours. A movement of celestial bodies means that the package immediately and must wait for the satellite-Hop, earth to heaven.

To send in the communication space is very different than in the world, where the surface topology of the Internet for us is obvious.

"What we do is not to say all the nodes that it is an amendment that happens," said Scott Burleigh, software engineer at NASA-Jet-Power Laboratory, Pasadena, California, a leading developer of DTN. "You can travel from A to B in this database is from 12:30 and ends with the sentence 3:30, and then you will not be able to return to the link ... to the next Tuesday.

Launching a test DTN in space last October, was successful. Code has been on the comet, Deep Impact probe study, to review the 2nd passage comet Hartley "We activated the software in the air and dozens of nodes around the Earth and let it alone run entirely by about a month, "said Burleigh. During the test, about 300 images that have stretched a short distance up to 24 million km. Although some errors were found, no packages, and no bit was damaged. The software is certainly not a reboot of the earth on the air. "The minutes may be less than the restoration of data and really good," said Keith Scott, Principal Engineer at the Mitra Corp., the Reston, Va., who has to DTN Burleigh and others.

DTN is the key to the technique as "store and forward." In fact, each node to hang, to data received, it can work with. On Earth, the data are stranded when there is a problem, and is again the source.

The second test, Kevin Gifford on the Payload Operations Control Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, a computer onboard the ISS for the images to earth.

In the third trial, in early October and includes the Deep Impact probe, the safety engineers and a new protocol file transfer protocol. Then akan DTN "quite ready for Deep-Space Search," said Jay Wyatt, the NASA program, which coordinates the project. At that time, researchers hope that other space agencies also try.

Scott miter chairs a working group of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, an international organization that recommends standards for space communications. You are taking into account the adoption of DTN. So Mission Mission, the network must develop a network of handsets on the planet and space stations.

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