Google Is Working With NASA
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Thursday, 30 October 2008 02:43 |
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Google is working with NASA to design and implement a revolutionary new scheme for space communication. Vinton G. Cerf, vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist for Google (responsible for identifying new enabling technologies and applications on the Internet and other platforms for the company) is working with a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where he is also a visiting scientist, and at the MITRE Corporation, based in Washington, DC, to design and implement a revolutionary new scheme for space communication. Cerf told Technology Review that he hopes that by 2010, new space missions will be designed to use the new protocols.
The project, dubbed the Interplanetary Internet, will be tested aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2009. Ultimately, the network could interconnect manned and robotic spacecraft, forming the backbone of a communications system that reaches across the solar system.
Technology Review's Brittany Sauser caught up with Cerf to discuss the details of the project. Looks like the project started 10 years ago as an attempt to figure out what kind of technical networking standards would be useful to support interplanetary communication. Vint Cerf stated that "In the Internet world, we use standards called the TCP/IP protocol suite--packet switching and store-and-forward methods--to allow a lot of different devices, billions of things, to interact compatibly with each other. The team set out to develop a suite of protocols that would allow us to have the kind of network flexibility in space that we have on Earth. The Interplanetary Internet project is primarily about developing a set of communication standards and technical specifications to support rich networking in space environments." For more information read the full interview here
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