NASA's Next Mars Mission Will Join the Interplanetary Internet 53
New submitter radioedit writes "When the MAVEN orbiter arrives at Mars on 22 September 2014, the spacecraft will join up with the other seven nodes of NASA's interplanetary internet, exchanging data with orbiters, rovers on the surface, and us back on Earth using delay-tolerant protocols. It's the latest part of Vint Cerf's mission (video) to create a giant antenna array across the solar system that'll be able to receive signals by laser from Alpha Centauri."
D1 still exists. (Score:2)
So sign in.
The D1 discussion system still works the same way. You don't have to worry about posting to undo moderation (although forgetting to moderate is more of a risk). On the possibly-negative side, you will tend to use a lot of tabs to see threads below your threshold. I recommend a tree view tab organizer, which has the additional benefit of being a far more sensible way to browse online source code.
It is a few mouse clicks and a registration form away. For interested account holders, from your Accoun
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NASA's interplanetary internet just formed (Score:5, Funny)
and NSA is already snooping
signals by laser from Alpha Centauri (Score:4, Funny)
Latency of 9 years for a round-trip, and there I thought that calling the helpdesk was slow...
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What did you expect. It's Maven crawling along like an Ant. Just infinitely more complex and bloated.
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True – but seriously, if we could get a continuous stream of images and other data back, the four year delay wouldn't matter that much. Of course, the probe would have to be fully autonomous, not need any patching and be prepared to expect the unexpected.
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You think the latency is bad, this will be the slowest deployment roleout in history
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Network structure (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if they use IPv4 or IPv6.
And did NASA already pre-allocate subnets and create routing tables for the other planets in advance?
Re:Network structure (Score:4, Interesting)
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Perhaps we should start by assigning an IP address to every star in the galaxy, and see how many are left over. Or we could try area codes.
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Therefore, saving just one 128 bit subnet for earth, and making all the rest available for the others would be the right approach. Earth's IPv6 would be unaffected, while outside earth, anybody making their own systems can be co-opted by this superset IP
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I read somewhere that there are less than 2^128 atoms in the universe, so we don't need IPv7 until we have cross-universe networking.
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Even if it is IP, it will not be TCP. The IETF has fought against bandwidth resistant protocols for at least as long as I've followed them since going to quarterly meetings from 1988 until 1990. They want to push faster bandwidth and lower latency, which is a good thing, but they just don't get reality. Currently, I manage a network for a company that owns several chains of restaurants. For example, in Seattle we have 10s of seconds of RTT from our data center to several of our restaurants. We used to
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Re:What laser? (Score:4, Insightful)
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When private industry gets its hands on the raw, hopefully cheaper materials from space mining, the things they will do will be limitless.
Not the way that private industry is run today. Corporations need to get beyond the "maximum short-term ROI" mindset that has ruled it for the past two centuries, and I see no sign of that happening nor any logical path that might lead it to happen. If private industry were interested in the long-term we'd have solar power satellites by now.
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Any Siemens PLC's on board of the Mars Rovers?
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Imagine (Score:3)
Will Mr. Cerf's Profile Pic (Score:3)
I like the meme (Score:2)
Domain Name? (Score:2)
Mars colonists (Score:1)