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| Artist's rendering of International Space Station [IMAGE: NASA] |
Washington: NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) successfully have
used an experimental version of interplanetary Internet to control an
educational rover from the International Space Station. The experiment used
NASA's Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol to transmit messages and
demonstrate technology that one day may enable Internet-like communications
with space vehicles and support habitats or infrastructure on another planet.
Space station
Expedition 33 commander Sunita Williams in late October used a NASA-developed
laptop to remotely drive a small LEGO robot at the European Space Operations
Centre in Darmstadt, Germany. The European-led experiment used NASA's DTN to
simulate a scenario in which an astronaut in a vehicle orbiting a planetary
body controls a robotic rover on the planet's 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 we've 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."
The 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 or robotic systems. The core
of the DTN suite is the Bundle Protocol (BP), which is roughly 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. In DTN, data
move through the network "hop-by-hop." While waiting for the next
link to become connected, bundles are temporarily stored and then forwarded to
the next node when the link becomes available.
NASA's work on DTN is
part of the agency's Space Communication and Navigation (SCaN) Program. SCaN
coordinates multiple space communications networks and network support
functions to regulate, maintain and grow NASA's space communications and
navigation capabilities in support of the agency's space missions.
The space station
also serves as a platform for research focused on human health and exploration,
technology testing for enabling future exploration, research in basic life and
physical sciences and Earth and space science.