Quad Lasers Deliver Fast, Earth-Based Internet To the Moon 131
A joint project involving NASA and MIT researchers had demonstrated technology last year that could supply a lunar colony with broadband via lasers ("faster Internet access than many U.S. homes get") and has already demonstrated its worth in communications with spacecraft. From ComputerWorld's article: "The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) kicked off last September with the launch of NASA's LADEE (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer), a research satellite [formerly] orbiting the moon. NASA built a laser communications module into LADEE for use in the high-speed wireless experiment. LLCD has already proved itself, transmitting data from LADEE to Earth at 622Mbps (bits per second) and in the other direction at 19.44Mbps, according to MIT. It beat the fastest-ever radio communication to the moon by a factor of 4,800." Communicating at such distances means overcoming various challenges; one of the biggest is the variability in Earth's atmosphere. The LLCD didn't try to power through the atmosphere at only one spot, therefore, but used four separate beams in the New Mexico desert, each aimed "through a different column of air, where the light-bending effects of the atmosphere are slightly different. That increased the chance that at least one of the beams would reach the receiver on the LADEE. Test results [were] promising, according to MIT, with the 384,633-kilometer optical link providing error-free performance in both darkness and bright sunlight, through partly transparent thin clouds, and through atmospheric turbulence that affected signal power." At the CLEO: 2014 conference in June, researchers will provide a comprehensive explanation of how it worked.
ping rate (Score:1)
gaming's going to suck
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Astronauts tend to be educated with plenty of intelligence and over 12 so I doubt many will play Call of Duty. Games like Civilization 5 however are perfect. :)
latency (Score:2)
Exactly, more bandwidth could be less important than latency:
http://pandawhale.com/post/396... [pandawhale.com]
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Well since the dominating factor in earth-moon communication is the speed of light with 2.6 seconds round trip you'll never have decent latency anyway, for the same reason we'll never have global FPS servers working well. Halfway around the the earth (20000 km) with light going about 2/3c in fiber optics is 100 ms just here on earth. And Mars is 8-40 minutes away round trip, which is a far more likely site for a colony. That said, if you were stuck in a cramped little base - the initial versions will probab
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For Mars and so on, you'll need something else:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Something like TCP just won't cut it.
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Only 2.6 seconds? I've used Internet services on more than one continent that have had things so badly configured my ping times - even to servers like 8.8.8.8 - were more than a minute. Even recently in the US I was using something that gave me pings of 13 or 14 seconds to Google or OpenDNS or something.
Telnetting to the moon (Score:2)
Telnetting to the moon
Let me play amoung delays
Let me see what lag is like
On jupiter and mars
on "Fly me to the moon" from F.Sinatra
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If you ever have extended occupancy a computer geek, and 8 lbs of discretionary cargo, there will be a game server on the moon. Maybe a few more pounds if you need your own power source.
Http:\\OpenLuna.org will bring them there when they build their outpost. http:\\Keplershipyards.com is already planning on integrating "Recreational software" into the computers that they are building for OL to run the outpost and to integrate into the suit. Since the suits have VR and remote control consoles for the rovers, (using VR gloves and such) AR full-body COD anyone?
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gaming's going to suck
On the other hand, PR0N is going to rock! :-)
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On the other hand, PR0N is going to rock! :-)
Low gravity boobs and ceiling stains?
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that's OK. there's a data cap of 10Mb/month.
Re:DUH (Score:5, Funny)
No one can defeat the quad laser. The bullet is enormous, there is no escaping.
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and I'm going to hire sharks to aim them
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LOL. That was my first thought too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
To the Moon, eh? (Score:4, Funny)
"faster Internet access than many U.S. homes get"
That's not hard to do. In the United States, our high speed Internet is much like our high speed rail...
The moon, eh? This will be important when we get around to mining the moon into a block of Swiss cheese for whatever mineral riches it possesses. I predict China will be the first, and we Americans will follow soon after they have opened the door.
Re:To the Moon, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
...
The moon, eh? This will be important when we get around to mining the moon into a block of Swiss cheese for whatever mineral riches it possesses. I predict China will be the first, and we Americans will follow soon after they have opened the door.
cheese is not at all popular in China. i predict the French will pioneer this mining effort, or maybe the Swiss... not sure.
Re:To the Moon, eh? (Score:4, Funny)
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"The materials that we use on earth are plentiful enough..." except for those that we don't use because they are NOT plentiful enough on earth, like Helium 3. There are plenty of others as well.
But which of those are available on the moon? Certainly not He3. The elements that the moon are much richer in than Earth seems to be those Earth still has plenty of, like Iron, Calcium, Magnesium and Titanium.
Also, you may mine the ore, but what do you do with it then? Any economically viable techniques for converting ore into usable concentrations of elements depend on an atmosphere. We'd need some completely new technologies, and chances are that if we find them, they will work just fine on Earth too
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But which of those are available on the moon? Certainly not He3. The elements that the moon are much richer in than Earth seems to be those Earth still has plenty of, like Iron, Calcium, Magnesium and Titanium.
From the Wikipedia article on Helium-3 [wikipedia.org]:
It is rare on Earth, and it is sought for use in nuclear fusion research. The abundance of helium-3 is thought to be greater on the Moon (embedded in the upper layer of regolith by the solar wind over billions of years)
They even have a whole section about mining the moon for He-3
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Except that the "abundance" of He3 on the moon is thought to be on the surface area on the darker areas, with concentrations up to 50 ppb. That's right, per billion.
Given that we have sources on Earth, like coal mines with per million concentrations, and gas fields with per cent concentrations, I don't think "abundance" is the right word.
Not that we currently need a lot of He-3 - not enough so that we bother to extract it in most cases.
Given the main proposed future use, this is a solution looking for a pr
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He3 is fuel for a type of reactor no-one has yet managed to make, and that can be operated on less-exotic hydrogen isotopes anyway.
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With that kind of added latency, it's not going to feel high-speed...
Clearly we are going to have to build a large server farm on the Moon if the users there expect to stream Netflix.
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Clearly we are going to have to build a large server farm on the Moon if the users there expect to stream Netflix.
Indeed. When working on a large project like this, I always suggest focusing on the most important parts first.
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Then why netflix? Why wasn't porn the first thing mentioned?
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Not necessary, streaming is mostly bandwidth dependent, not latency dependent. It might take an extra few seconds before your show starts but that's fairly inconsequential. Browsing the web and playing games are far more problematic.
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At some point, if there are enough consumers living beyond Earth orbit to commercially matter to normal web sites (or their future equivalent), the most logical step would be to allow web applications to bundle themselves and their data in a way that allows the web app ITSELF to be automatically deployed to a remote virtual server closer to the end user & sync its mirror of the database with the authoritative one back on earth (multicasting most of the replicated data from earth to elsewhere & cachi
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And who exactly is going to enforce the law? The same people who enforce all the varied UN declarations and edicts?
Scotty . . . (Score:2)
Beam me up.
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Snotty beamed me twice last night. It was wonderful.
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They can send a ping to the moon.... (Score:5, Informative)
So show of hands here, who has a 622 Mbps at home? That's right, as of this article, your "last mile" officially sucks more than LADEE's last 250,000 miles
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So show of hands here, who has a 622 Mbps at home? That's right, as of this article, your "last mile" officially sucks more than LADEE's last 250,000 miles
You're paying $29.99 a month.
LADEE cost over $300 million.
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LADEE cost over $300 million.
Yeah and with Comcast as an ISP its stuck with a 30GB/month bandwidth cap too.
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It's 300, not 30, and they aren't enforcing it.
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I just checked my Comcast and it states "not currently enforced".
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Not saying its true or not, but I've went over for multiple months in a row and haven't heard a thing.
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And they have longer months on the moon too...
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Remote sites typically have to pay for the entirety of the last mile costs themselves. Your point was?
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I do. 1000 Mbit, to be exact. 18 bucks a month, give or take.
Problem?
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Nope. I'm located in a third world country.
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Now that's just nitpicking.
All I know is that the vast majority of the stuff I attempt to download is coming in at highest speed my HDD could download. As a home user, that's heaven.
All else is useless detail.
That is far faster than (Score:4, Funny)
their last one [youtube.com]
comcast moon will still cap you at 250GB (Score:2)
and then $10 per each 50GB over that.
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So you're saying no pro series astronaut FPS earth deathmatching?
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Obsolete Article (Score:5, Informative)
Readers here should know that LADEE was crashed into the moon more than a month ago. Yes, NASA did research on laser communication using LADEE, but reporting it in present tense is misleading. (...and the last Slashdot article on LADEE incorrectly reported where it crashed.) Previous Slashdot articles already reported the laser communication research.
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This article was submitted through the crashed LADEE so it took a while for it to align with Earth perfectly for us to finally receive it.
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You're right. I've updated the article to correct the tenses. Thanks.
Let's be realistic (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't think anyone at NASA thinks that it will be NASA to benefit from this research. The US government's research projects are generally funded to provide pioneering foreward looking technologies that no private company would invest in developing until 10+ years from now. So that way when private industry does need that technologythey already have something to get started from.
The one exception of course is development of new weapons and military systems.
Realistically, how else will... (Score:2)
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When it comes to space related projects there needs to be a return on the investment to bolster future funding. Even "vapor" returns can provide the political cover necessary to increase funding. The money NASA has spent over the years has returned a wealth of technological data but nothing that could realistically cover the initial project expense. However, over the years NASA has received funding regardless of the expected return on the investment. If someone wants to mine helium 3 on the moon it should b
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I think a large radiotelescope or constellation of radiotelescopes on the far side of the moon would be very useful but of course you will have trouble building that.
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You've got it backwards, the high speed is moon->earth, earth->moon is the slow one.
What? (Score:2)
Earth-based? As opposed to what, Internet from Mars?
Why Moon (Score:1)
Why do you want to connect the moon with the Internet? There is nobody on the moon. You should rather try to establish a 24h broadband connection to the ISS, which currently doesn't exist (its only a couple of hours per day when you can make video connections to ISS).
Moon Unit Zappa (Score:2)
Obviously, they meant Quad "Lasers".
English, do you speak it? (Score:2)
The link described is a very slow pipe by any measure, and that is imposed by the distance involved and the speed of light itself. It is the dimension of *width* they compare, which cannot in any reasonable way be equated with speed. If 'speed' is measured by bandwidth, then it would follow that a semi tractor with two trailers is much faster than a Maserati.
Yeah.
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Don't be an idiot. If you have to move 75,000 pounds of freight, the semi is much faster than the Maserati.
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You have to twist yourself into a pretzel to justify the marketing speak, why do you even try?
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And it is market speak, they know customers want 'fast' but customers dont typically understand the technology enough to
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Presumably the point of the lasers is to deliver data. It is not transmission for the sake of transmission. Similarly, the point of the truck and the Maserati is to move something. The most salient analogy would be cargo. But even if it were to move human beings, a truck, train, or freighter is much better than a Maserati unless your goal is to move a single person. Is this quad laser system for moving a single packet? I doubt it.
A link with a 5ms latency and 25mb symmetrical upload and download width is a faster link than a link with a 350ms latency and 1024mb/1mb asymmetrical width by any reasonable definition of the word.
Depending on what kind of data is being moved. Interactive web? Probably unnot
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'Faster' is meaningless in this context without specifying what is moving faster.
sharks! (Score:2)
Latentcy isn't just sucky for games. (Score:2)
What are they using for a detector? (Score:3)
Incoming power at the satellite is stated as a nanowatt. I'm pretty sure this puts it way below the threshold of most, if not all, solid state optical detectors. I'm thinking some kind of FAST photomultiplier tube, but I really have no idea. Any thoughts?
Think of using something like this to transmit terrestrially through air of many miles/kilometers distance RELIABLY rather than the one or (if you're lucky) two you get today: it would be a godsend and could replace a LOT of metro microwave (depending on which city and its local climate, of course) without having to lay fiber. Its the unlicensed holy grail, really.
Lunar Colony (Score:2)
We have a lunar colony? Who knew?
I suppose its symptomatic of the generation that we can't think about the logistics of a real lunar colony until we figure out how they would get their internet porn.
Cool. (Score:2)
I am deeply skeptical of a moon colony. I really don't think it will ever happen.
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It could be done, but there's no reason to - it'd be one of the most expensive projects in all of human history, and for what? It's not economical to mine, there's no national pride to be had now, and the science may be valuable but not that valuable.
We'll probably still be having this debate when someone discovers the mountain-sized rock heading towards Earth.
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We'll get to watch the colonists in HD video as they die of radiation from a coronal mass ejection.
I am deeply skeptical of a moon colony. I really don't think it will ever happen.
You are probably right.... for very small values of "ever". But given that there's probably at least a half-billion years before the sun begins to cook our part of the solar system, there's plenty of time to beat "never".
Well it's comparatively easy (Score:2)
There is, apart from some clouds, nothing in between. Those are ideal conditions. Considering that even the radio links of the moon missions had a few megabits of channel capacity, that's not very much. (Yes those links were analog, but Shannon has showed that you can still express the capacity of such a channel in bits or shannons)
Just a thought (Score:2)