Described as a “work in progress,” the proposal to the Internet Engineering Task Force–the group that sets standards for the Net–calls for terrestrial testing of interplanetary Internet protocols later this year, with a live test onboard the NASA Mars mission in 2003. “What we are fundamentally about is deploying as much re-usable, standardized communications infrastructure as we can afford around the solar system, so that future missions don’t have to take it all along with them,” said Adrian J. Hooke, manager of the DARPA InterPlaNetary Internet (IPN) Project and co-author of the proposal. “They can use capabilities put in place by other missions.”