You've Got Mail...from Mars!

November 21, 2008

You've heard of the World Wide Web. Now, get ready for the Out-Of-This-World Wide Web. This week, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab announced that it had successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet. Take a gander at an artist concept, courtesy of NASA/JPL.

JPL officials are calling this the first step in creating an "interplanetary Internet." At its heart, this system uses software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN. It's the brainchild of NASA and Vint Cerf, now VP at Google. Cerf and NASA partnered a decade ago to start work on DTN, which differs from the normal 'net protocol (TCP/IP) used here on Earth. Think about it -- all those little flying packets of information have to find a way around the delays and disruptions of space, such as when a spacecraft moves behind a planet or a solar storm kicks up. JPL notes that the delay in sending or receiving data from Mars, for example, can take between three and half to 20 minutes...at the speed of light.

DTN uses "nodes" to pass the information along. These nodes store all the data, and then pass it along when they can safely communicate with the next node. It's a classic "store-and-forward" method that NASA likens to basketball players "safely passing the ball to the player nearest the basket."

So how does DTN differ from how information is currently passed along from, say, a Mars orbiter? Leigh Torgerson, manager of the DTN Experiment Operations Center at JPL, says: "In space today, an operations team has to manually schedule each link and generate all the commands to specify which data to send, when to send it, and where to send it. With standardized DTN, this can all be done automatically."

OK, so standardization is still a long way off. In this week's test case, the only "node" that was off-planet was the Epoxi spacecraft, which is on a mission to encounter Comet Hartley two years from now. NASA already uses Epoxi as a relay for data from spacecraft currently at Mars. The other nine nodes were here on Earth, serving as stand-in simulators for a series of landers, orbiters and operations centers.

The DTN test, though, managed to successfully transmit dozens of images to and from Epoxi -- which is currently more than 20 million miles from Earth. NASA hopes that in the next few years, DTN will start to make it easier to plan and support complex missions, and maybe even a Moon base.

Personally, I can't wait for the first spam email sent from a far-off Martian colony.

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