November 9, 2012

Image Caption: NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, Expedition 33 commander, participates in a session of extravehicular activity outside the International Space Station on Nov. 1, 2012. Credit: NASA

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com Your Universe Online

NASA has demonstrated the future of the Internet in space, showing how one day space vehicles and habitats could be equipped with the Internet.

Space station Expedition 33 commander Sunita Williams used a NASA-developed laptop in October to remotely drive a small LEGO robot at the European Space Observatory Center in Darmstadt, Germany.

The experiment used NASAs Disruption Tolerant Network (DTN) to simulate a scenario in which an astronaut in a vehicle orbiting a planetary body controls a robotic rover on the planets surface.

The demonstration showed the feasibility of using a new communications infrastructure to send commands to a surface robot from an orbiting spacecraft and receive images and data back from the robot, said Badri Younes, deputy associate administrator for space communications and navigation at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The experimental DTN weve tested from the space station may one day be used by humans on a spacecraft in orbit around Mars to operate robots on the surface, or from Earth using orbiting satellites as relay stations.

NASAs DTN architecture is a new communications technology that enables standardized communications similar to the Internet to function over long distances and through time delays associated with on-orbit or deep space spacecraft.

The DTN suite features a Bundle Protocol (BP), which is almost equivalent to the Internet Protocol (IP) that serves as the core of the Internet on Earth.

While IP assumes a continuous end-to-end data path exists between the user and a remote space system, DTN accounts for disconnections and errors.

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Experimental Interplanetary Internet Test From International Space Station