Although the crew of the spacecraft Endeavour experienced a glitch in the first space walk when an astronaut accidentally let her tool bag float away, NASA had a lot to celebrate as it announced success with a high-tech space program.
NASA, along with Vinton Cerf, a Google vice president, successfully tested a deep-space network  modeled after the Internet. Engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., have transmitted dozens of images to and from the spacecraft located 20 million miles from Earth using disruption-tolerant networking (DTN) software.
DTN, which sends information differently from the TCP/IP protocol used by the Internet, was developed a decade ago by NASA engineers and Cerf, who is known to many as the "father of the Internet" and is a visiting scientist at JPL.
Interplanetary Internet
"This is the first step in creating a totally new space communications capability, an interplanetary Internet," said Adrian Hooke, team lead and manager of space-networking architecture at NASA.
The month-long experiment is the first of many planned tests to qualify the technology for use on future space missions. If NASA continues to succeed with DTN, astronauts on manned missions will be able to communicate with researchers worldwide. NASA is planning its next round of testing next summer, using DTN software on the International Space Station.
"We have been doing this test for a month and it has been working well and it's exciting getting the word out that we had a good round of testing," said Leigh Torgerson, manager of the DTN experiment operations center at JPL, in a phone interview.
"We needed some way of automating the data routing process in a standard way so any other space agency can pick up the protocol and use it," Torgerson said. "The more nodes you have, the more paths you have to get data back and the easier it is to receive the data."
Like the Endeavour team's first walk, not everything in the testing went off without a hitch. "There was an unexpected uplink system failure at one of the deep-space network sites, which interrupted some file transfers, and the DTN protocol took care of retransmitting the missed data automatically so nothing was lost," Torgerson said. (continued...)
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