p2pnet.net News:- Could the Net be used by spacecraft moving among the stars?

Asking is Vint Cerf who was involved in the early design of the ARPANET and who’s one of the co-authors of the TCP/IP protocol that let ARPA connect various independent networks to form one vast the Inter-Net.

He’s now often called the father of the Net and in the 21st century, “What might we do to take advantage of what we have learned … ?” – he wondered, interviewed for the BBC’s Click Online programme.

“We are trying to find out what is out there but in order to get that information back to Earth we have to communicate. What we are looking at now is the possibility of using the internet kinds of protocols to support the communications for spacecrafts that are moving around in the solar system.”

Using Earth and Mars as examples, he points out that at 186,000 miles per second, it takes five minutes for a radio signal to gmove between the two, even when they’re at their closest, and 20 minutes when they’re farthest apart.

“So there is no such notion as ‘now’ in an environment where things are so far apart,” he told the BBC, going on:

“We have gone through several iterations of the communication protocol design – the details of how you communicate in this strange environment. What we have managed to do is to get several layers of protocols specified. All of these kinds of network protocols come in like layers of a layer cake.

“We defined the lower two levels: they are already on board the two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, that are on the surface of Mars today. The other layers of protocol that we are testing here on planet Earth, we hope to send to outer space in around 2009 with a specialised telecommunications orbiter.

“We are not too many years away from having a kind of two-planet internet in operation.”

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See:-

ARPANET – Internet Pioneers

Click Online – Towards an internet in space, BBC News Online, September 19, 2004

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