Laser Communication System Sets Record With Data Transmissions From Moon 43
sighted writes "NASA reports that it has used a pulsed laser beam to transmit data over the 384,633 kilometers (239,000 miles) between the Moon and the Earth at a transfer rate of 622 megabits per second. The transmissions took place between a ground station in New Mexico and the LADEE robotic spacecraft now orbiting the moon. 'LLCD is NASA's first system for two-way communication using a laser instead of radio waves. It also has demonstrated an error-free data upload rate of 20 Mbps transmitted from the primary ground station in New Mexico to the spacecraft currently orbiting the moon. ... LLCD is a short-duration experiment and the precursor to NASA's long-duration demonstration, the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration (LCRD). LCRD is a part of the agency's Technology Demonstration Missions Program, which is working to develop crosscutting technology capable of operating in the rigors of space. It is scheduled to launch in 2017.'"
Re:20 mb between planets.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, but the latency! Forget playing BattleField 4 with those pings.
Well, yes, to the DRM server... But multiplayer should be fine over LAN (Lunar Area Networking). The store and forward DTN (delay tolerant networking) of the interstellar Internet will have to be supported eventually anyway. I've actually been experimenting with "games" that have persistent worlds that can support multiple planets worth of people via sparse information graphing, going so far as to use your "Network Simulator" on Debian to implement an aproximation of NASA's planned solar system wide DTN implementation. The laser bandwidth is going to be an awesome boon, much needed before any amount of populous can correspond interplanetarily in a practical manner.
For slower-than-light interplanetary "gaming" the answer is to do like those beloved "BBS" classics, e.g., Tradewars, for the synch data. That way whenever more data becomes available it can appear, without the requirement for a real-time centralized server system. I still think that's a great way to play a game -- Get in, do your actions for that day, check messages and what not, then put it down and get to work, check back the next day -- Rather than the frantic skinner box, just make it part of the daily routine, ah those were the days. Mine has world building with quotas on vertex and texture amounts per volume, and is indexed via huge sparse octree -- Procedurally generating the unmodified nodes so folks who haven't staked a claim can still explore the same areas. For realtime gameplay atop the semi-synchronized user generated content, faction vs faction matchmaking only works in your latency neighborhood. So, ISS to other orbital platforms could work for a quick deathmatch if they weren't in too wildly different of an orbit, but otherwise they'd be limited to the secondary slower gameplay between Earth, its moon, and Mars, etc.
DTN support would actually be friggin' awesome to have built in down here too. It's basically automatic caching w/ deduplication and free collocation. Methinks you'll have to ditch the "filename" idea though (at least in its current form) -- Eventually you'll realize those are only useful for display of a "region" specific designation, but what your mechano-electic slaves will request instead is the info-hash; So that renaming "Album03-0003.ogv" to "Moon-Cat-Leaps.ogv" or "QIp vIghro' pum.ogv" will end up being only one payload no matter which you request. That's also VERY MUCH NEEDED for mixed secure and insecure content display anyway, so that the secured page can specify the hash of the unencrypted external file to embed and be sure it wasn't tampered -- SSL that can be cached! What am I saying? That's crazy talk! The W3C HTML goons will never go for anything that logical, unless you grease their grubby little lobes, ugh, Ferengi...
Oh, look at me just bubbling over about your species burgeoning potential progress. I'll just let you nudies get back to your exciting earth news... Nope, don't mind me, not socially engineering alien acclimation systems; No sir, not a violation of the prime directive at all... It's not like I need a vacation from watching all the depressing politics going on down here or anything.