NASA is about to make it a little easier to check your Instagram in zero gravity. Two teams, Science Mission Directorate and Human Exploration and Operations, are working together to finally make interplanetary internet a thing. Previous efforts to bring WiFi throughout the solar system haven’t always been successful, but this time, it could become reality.
It will work using something called
Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, which is pretty similar to the internet you’re familiar with. But conventional internet doesn’t do well in space, plagued with long delays, noisy channels, and
high error rates.
With DTN, even if your connection gets disrupted, it will guarantee data packet delivery once the next communication path opens. Normally, if you lose connection, the data gets dumped. But by removing the need to retransmit during a lag, it saves time and frees up the limited memory used by spacecraft.
Cosmic WiFI
Getting WiFi in space is complex, especially given typical extreme distances and fragile connection links. Even if your internet is traveling at lightspeed, it can take considerable time to send a message from Earth to Mars, for example. NASA previously proposed bringing the internet to the Red Planet in 2009, but due to budget constraints, the
Mars Telecommunications Orbiter was scrapped. It would have used high-speed radio signals and laser light beams to send the equivalent of three compact disks of data each day.
DTN will now be deployed with the launch of PACE, or the Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem Mission, an Earth-monitoring satellite operation that will advance our understanding of climate change. The satellite, slated for launch in 2022, will surveil everything from massive storms to algal blooms to carbon cycles, teaching us more about the health of the planet’s oceans.