NASA interplanetary Internet, soon on a planet near you

NASA is about to make it a little easier to check your Instagram in zero gravity. Two teams, Science Mission Directorate and Human Exploration and Operations, are working together to finally make the interplanetary Internet one thing. Previous efforts to bring WiFi into the solar system have not always been successful, but this time it could become a reality.

It will work by using something called Delay / Disruption Tolerant Networking, which is quite similar to the Internet. familiar with. But the conventional Internet does not work well in the space, with long delays, noisy channels and high error rates.

With DTN, even if your connection is disrupted, it will guarantee the delivery of the data packets. Normally, if you lose the connection, the data is dumped. But by eliminating the need to retransmit in case of delay, it saves time and frees the limited memory used by spacecraft.

Cosmic WiFI
Getting WiFi in the space is complex, especially with extreme distances and fragile connections links. Even if your internet travels at the speed of light, it can take a long time to send a message from Earth to Mars, for example. NASA had already proposed to connect the Internet to the red planet in 2009, but due to budget constraints, the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter was abandoned. He would have used high-speed radio signals and laser light beams to send the equivalent of three compact disks of data each day

DTN will now be deployed with the launch of PACE, or Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, Ocean ecosystem. Mission, a satellite earth monitoring operation that will advance our understanding of climate change. The satellite, scheduled for launch in 2022, will monitor anything from mbadive storms to algal blooms to carbon cycles to learn more about the health of the planet's oceans