NASA upgraded the bandwidth connection to its pokey twin Mars rovers, a boost that will allow scientists to send and receive data like pictures more quickly, a mission manager said Friday. The rate is now nearly five times the speed of home dial-up Internet connections.
February 12th, 2004
Interplanetary International Internet Launched
In a sign of cosmic communications to come, last week mission controllers sent signals to a Mars-orbiting European spacecraft, which relayed the instructions to NASA’s Spirit rover on the surface, and a signal was returned to Earth back along the same path. It was the initial transmission across what could be called the first-generation Interplanetary International Internet.
February 6th, 2004
The 100-Million-Mile Network Baseline
Think your network is hard to manage? Try remote diagnosis and repair when you’re relying on radio signals from Mars. Eighteen days after landing on Mars, the robotic explorer named Spirit squawked in distress and went silent for nearly 24 hours. Listening anxiously for any sign of life were navigators at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. They had to fix a broken interplanetary communications link that reached more than 100 million miles (and counting-the distance keeps growing as the orbits of Earth and Mars draw apart).
January 21st, 2004
Storm clouds over Australia give US Mars robot a day of rest
Thunder and lightning storms over Australia Wednesday prevented NASA from sending the Mars robot Spirit its daily “road map,” giving the six-wheeled explorer a rest on its 18th day on Mars, NASA said.
January 11th, 2004
Israeli technology enables images beamed from Mars ISRAEL21c
Research by three scientists from the Haifa Technion made the transmission of video pictures from Mars by the NASA explorer “Spirit” possible, according to HP (Hewlett Packard) Labs, which was responsible for the image transmissions. The ability to transmit the images was feasible thanks to a unique algorithm developed by Technion graduates living in the US as a continuation of work launched by two other Technion professors a quarter of a century ago.
January 9th, 2004
Mars downloaders swamp NASA Web site Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Think of the Library of Congress’s entire print collections – and then some – to get an idea of how much data space enthusiasts have downloaded from NASA’s Web sites this week. Visitors had obtained more than 34.6 terabytes of images, video and other information as of Friday afternoon, the bulk related to the Mars rover Spirit. By some estimates, all the words in every book in the Library of Congress total 20 terabytes.
December 29th, 2003
Red Planet 911: Mars Rover Hotline Set Up
Think of it as the Mars equivalent of an emergency 911 call for help. Operators of NASA’s Mars rovers have established a backup remote site in the event of a natural disaster, malfunctioning ground equipment, or even a terrorist attack to maintain critical contact with space vehicles as they near the red planet. A unique Emergency Control Center, or ECC, has been set up at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, Colorado. If a natural or human-generated event interrupted JPL operations, the ECC would assume control of the vehicles as they streak toward their Mars landings.
December 24th, 2003
Out of This World
The solar system’s largest wireless network just got a face-lift. With $54 million of improvements
December 15th, 2003
Phoning Home
The first thing controllers hope to hear as the earliest of three Mars probes touches down on the Red Planet on Christmas day is a nine-tone ditty by the British rock band, Blur. From that point on, Mars will only get noisier. If all goes to plan, three probes will be exploring Mars’ surface by the end of January and relaying everything they learn back to Earth directly or by way of two orbiters that are now zipping around the planet. NASA is bracing for the communications crunch.