Author Archives: jnelson

Future space explorers, both robotic and human, now have a new way to communicate with each other – by the Internet. While email has been used for some time from low Earth orbit, and astronauts have even posted to Facebook and Twitter, the actual connections utilize the standard radio point-to-point links that have been used all along. For modern fleets exploring space, which include far-flung satellites, spacecraft, rovers and maybe bases someday, this is insufficient, just as the traditional Internet would be. Point-to-point creates a single line of communication between two stations, such as ground control and say, a satellite circling Mars. Another such direct connection can create a line of communication between the ground and a rover on the planet. But the rover can’t communicate directly with the satellite. The network only goes through ground control. An “Internet-like” connection changes all that. Then, everything could talk with everything else – or it could except for the distance. The problem with installing the Net on such widely separated systems is that unlike communications in science fiction, radio waves move at the speed of light. The Enterprise can call Starfleet Command every time they run into the Klingons, but real spaceships anywhere beyond the Earth-Moon system will not find it so easy. While it’s only 1.25 seconds for a message to get from Earth to the Moon, to Mars it ranges from over 4 minutes to over 20. And that’s just … Continue reading →