Google is working with NASA to develop a new efficient
communications system in space.
Having jointly designed the networking protocols that launched
the internet, Vint Cerf, Google vice-president and chief internet
evangelist, is now working with NASA on expanding the web's
reach.
Currently, astronauts and robotic spacecraft communicate with
Earth using point-to-point radio links and communications that are
tailored to specific space missions.
This way of doing things inhibits interoperability and the reuse
of communications equipment.
Cerf is working with a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(JPL) to design a new comms system. The project, known as the
Interplanetary Internet, will be tested aboard the International
Space Station (ISS) in 2009.
Cerf hopes that by 2010, new space missions will be designed to
use the new protocols, he told Technology Review.
Read the full project report.