It is midnight on 1 January 2004 and you want to send a greeting on your mobile phone to a friend. Sorry, the line is too busy, try again later. If you think you are alone with this problem, you are wrong. Space agencies have had to work out ingenious solutions to prevent similar ‘engaged, call later’ tones from happening on Mars. For the first time, there will be seven spacecraft on the Red Planet at the same time. Will they all be able to ‘phone home’?
January 21st, 2003
Australian bush fires closed Deep Space Network New Scientist
The firestorms that devastated the Canberra region at the weekend, killing four people, also forced NASA’s Deep Space Network facility offline for four hours, it has emerged. The DSN installation, 40 km from the Australian capital, is responsible for tracking and controlling deep space spacecraft from the southern hemisphere. There are two other tracking stations in the northern hemisphere.
December 16th, 2002
Wireless to Mars and 3G vs. PHS Speed Test Wireless Watch Japan
They have high-speed network links back to planet Earth. The architecture diagram of Mars Rover looks just like the architecture diagram of any ol’ Earth-based, end-to-end enterprise app. And they’ve got this problem that the network link is very slow… it has high latency. Well of course. It covers a hundred million kilometers. Join us for WWJ’s special year-end program!
December 7th, 2002
Intel’s connecting the Net to Mars ZDNet News
Intel is working on bringing the Internet to the bottom of the ocean, the surface of Mars and, on a more prosaic note, into conference room thermostats and hospital charts. Intel’s vision for “proactive computing”–in which remote sensors will feed information about the physical world to computers for analysis and use by humans–is moving closer to reality, said David Tennenhouse, vice president and director of Intel research, at the MicroVentures conference taking place here this week. Additionally, the company is raising the ante in showing how and where the technology can be used. Intel itself, for example, has teamed with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to use the technology to create an Internet link to Mars. The remote sensors will gather raw data about the planet’s environment and beam it up to an orbiting router.
September 6th, 2002
CSIRO to help ease NASA’s “traffic jam” CSIRO Australia
When six spacecraft besiege Mars in early 2004, CSIRO will help NASA catch as much data from them as possible. The three tracking stations of NASA’s Deep Space Network
July 25th, 2002
Laser communications crucial for space exploration New Scientist
New spacecraft and satellites must be fitted with lasers to transmit digital signals back to optical telescopes on Earth, argue astronomers in a new analysis. The alternative is that the ever-increasing amount of data collected by their improved sensors will get jammed in a serious communications bottleneck, cramping the exploration of the Earth and Solar System Space missions currently being planned will collect several billion bits (gigabits) of data per second. Since the data can only be transmitted back to Earth for a short time every day or two, the satellites will need to transmit about 100 gigabits per second.
July 15th, 2002
JPL Envisions Public Use of Mars Images, Deep Space Network
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) believes that if you can
February 19th, 2002
Space Net PC Magazine
If you thought setting up a DSL connection was tough, try setting up a multi-planet connection. Under the aegis of NASA Jet Propulsion Labs and its interplanetary communications project, WorldCom executive Vint Cerf
December 24th, 2001
2003 Missions Will Go to Mars with Christmas Spirit
Two years from now, Mars will be receiving Christmas gifts from the Earth – a whole fleet of spacecraft. The crafts are gifts from different nations, and will share communications channels to solve a problem which will intensify as Mars exploration gets on track: how to relay the data back to Earth gathered by many different missions. The first will arrive just before Christmas of 2003: the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and its lander, Beagle 2. The New Year will bring with it the Japanese ISAS’s Nozomi and NASA’s two Rovers. These will join NASA’s Mars Odyssey, which arrived on Mars last October and will still be operating.
July 16th, 2001
Internet To Mars Computerworld
The mining of asteroids, space-based hotels, zero-gravity manufacturing and medicine – they’re all part of the future commercialization of space, according to a joint government and industry group that’s developing the InterPlaNetary (IPN) Internet. Starting this year, with NASA funding, the IPN will roll out in pieces over the next several decades to support communications among spaceships, robots and manned and unmanned outposts in the solar system.