MOSCOW, November 9 (RIA Novosti) – NASA and ESA have tested an “interplanetary” internet channel that might one day enable control of equipment on a planet’s surface from orbit, NASA said in a statement on Friday.
As part of the experiment, Expedition 33 commander Sunita Williams used a NASA-developed laptop to operate a small LEGO robot at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany.
"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," he went on.
The DTN (Disruption Tolerant Networking) protocol provides standardized communications similar to the internet technology. Unlike the TCP/IP protocol used for internet connections all around the globe, DTN was designed to deal with disconnections, errors and delays of signal that are likely to emerge during interplanetary communication.
“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 said.
First successful tests of DTN were carried out in November 2008, when NASA specialists successfully transmitted about a dozen of images to the Deep Impact space probe, which at that moment was 32 million km from the Earth.
