Tuesday, January 26, 2010

NASA to upgrade “space internet” by 2018

John Brownlee
Geek.com

In space, no one can hear you Tweet.

Well, that’s not entirely true, but what is true is space Internet is a strange hodgepodge of communication systems, and collectively it all largely sucks. A new plan by NASA, however, will result in the agency consolidating its Space Network, Near Earth Network and Deep Space Network into one unified system… and hopefully, this will lead to vastly improved Internet access for astronauts.

The problem is that right now, NASA has no unified communication infrastructure. Each mission the agency puts together is uniquely put together, and communication equipment widely varies. This equipment consequently proves difficult to upgrade, leaving wide discrepancies in performance: the International Space Station, for example, gets sub-dial-up rates, while the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter can suck up over 450GB a day.

NASA’s aiming to fix this by appointing Badri Younes as deputy associate administrator for Space Communications and Navigation, who will overhaul, consolidate and standardize all of NASA’s disparate communications system by 2018.

Read the post, HERE.

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