Slashdot Mirror
The Dot in .mars
Skynet writes "CNN has a really cool interview with Chad Edwards, manager of the Mars Network Office, about NASA's desire to improve telecommunications to and from Mars. They plan to get a 1MBps link up by 2007. They also discuss the possibility of multiple Internets spread throughout solar system, all interconnected. Very interesting discussion."
Mars lost its magnetosphere a long, long time ago. The internal dynamo that earth has with molten rock swirling beneath the crust quit working in Mars eons ago. This magnetosphere is only one of the many things that is necessary for a planet to keep a stable atmosphere. Without a magnetosphere, fast moving solar particles can strip the atmosphere faster than Rosie O'Donnell taking on a Thanksgiving turkey. Think before you post.
They also discuss the possibility of multiple Internets spread throughout solar system, all interconnected. Who's to say that someone somewhere hasn't done it already.
I can see it now. Next target for a slashdotting? The big Jupe itself! Big planet, little bandwidth!
And what happens to the link if one of the martians decides he wants to hop in on a game of Quake? And what're his pings going to look like from almost 49 million miles away?
U R 0WN3D 3RTHL1NG!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
And what're his pings going to look like from almost 49 million miles away?
Probably a lot like any AOL user.
Does this mean they have to use AOL-speak/type too?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Sure they do. The boiling point of water drops with the pressure. Even in our own atmosphere we can get up to the boiling point. It is somewhere around 15 km up, IIRC.
Even easier: pump the air out of a container containing water and air. The water will boil eventually.
You're right about not exploding in space: our skin is strong enaugh to keep us together.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
And I'll probably *still* only be able to get a 28.8kbps connection to the Internet right here on *EARTH*. Grrrr....
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Don't forget eMars.com!
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Your eyes and mucous membranes willl probably go, though, and you will probably get pretty good pressure bruises on the surface of your skin. Exploding might be more pleasant :)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tape...
(BTW, to whom should I attribute this? I can't remember where I heard this.)
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Where else could Napster thrive?
Haha, this is great! It's a lot like the ansible technology stolen from the buggers. Although, I don't think electromagnetic radiation is tough enough to wire a solarsystem.
;) I wonder if there would be any dead zones? Like when the sun passes between you and a digipeater.
Although we could probably use our palm pilots on the moon. WAP would finally become standardised!
All of this is, of course, IMNSHO. Cheers, Elmo
".MA" is already taken - it's for Morocco.
THe important thing here really is that now we can get a game of Network Doom going with machines on Phobos, Demios and Earth.
>Personally I vote for ICP/IP
>(Interplanetary Control Protocol over IP)
or Insane Clown Posse / Internet Protocol
Mars was a name coined by the Romans, therefore it is Latin, Latin is the intenational language for naming things in science. SO .mars is not Americocentric.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
> THe important thing here really is that now we can get a game of Network Doom going
> with machines on Phobos, Demios and Earth.
The six minute ping might make deathmatching a little complicated...
dave
How come Mars gets a 1Mbps connection, and I'm stuck at 24k? They don't even have any people!
sup
Woopeee... guess i can register sex.mars now and make a fortune on it.
It's been a while, but that sounds like most of the basics are right. This concept is what Orson Scott Card used in the Ender books. They had some whatsit doohickey that carried split particles around the universe. However, that device was able to influence the spin of the particles, and it also assumed that the spin of on particle would affect the spin of the article on the other end. It's still cool.
----------------------
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
Sounds good to me, an Internet spread through the cosmos would be great.
All your...
Best Slashdot Co
Umm .. dunno if I've missed something here, but there isn't anybody living on mars ?
so the other end of this link isn't going to be all that interesting to talk to
Every ship and probe that goes out there has its own transmitter to Earth, so the only difference that this 'link' has is that it will use tcp/ip instead of whatever other protocol they were using.
And some script kiddie will DDoS it 24/7 just so that they can say they ddossed mars..
sounds like a rather silly idea, all things considered
Actually, I'm trying not to get pissed that robots on Mars will have broadband before I can get a reliable 28.8 to my house.
If I get there first, I'm calling it Ares. Mostly just to annoy all of the people who would have to rewrite the textbooks.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
We've been in this situation before - and indeed we still are in some ways. How do you, for example, communicate with a ship at sea whose only access is via satellites that they may or may not be able to reach, depending on the weather? The answer is typically uucp. Admittedly, this doesn't allow for streaming media or web surfing, but email and file transfer work. I suspect that the most likely configuration would be a uucp gateway on each end, with some automation being used to keep servers in sync. So if I am on Mars, and create a VR tour with my handheld camera, I can have it sent to a server on Earth for those on Earth who want to see it. Trying to serve that to Earth from Mars (or vice versa) would be a pain in the neck.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
If current TCP connection timeouts sit at 1-2 minutes for something that should be negotiated within a few seconds, what will the settings have to be for a Martian link?
Next thing you know, it will take 2 days for Internet Explorer to detect the nearest proxy server...
What kind of error checking would be needed to make sure that not just the bits are accurate but also that the whole packet or message is sent? If there's any error, the packet would need to be resent thus doubling the latency, right? Also, it seems that the moon would be a good place to start the interplanetary since one side is also facing the earth. Sorta like Steve Martin's arrow in the head gag. In one side, go around to the other side, then out. Just thinkin...
int 20h
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
:P
I just picked that IP out of thin air. Kinda scary that I chose a bible thumping site.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
One analogy often used for electricity is that of water flowing through a pipe; you open a valve to let the water flow. It's an inaccurate analogy, because it really should be water flowing through two channels, with a pump pulling water out of one and dumping it in the other.
If the water in the two channels starts out at the same level (same voltage), you can open a valve between the two and no water will flow. To get water to flow, you have to turn on the pump. Not only does it take a finite amount of time to pump the water level (voltage) up to any given level with a pump (generator) of finite capacity, it also takes time for the wave of increasing water level (voltage) to travel from the pump end of the channels to points farther away. In electrical terms, this is known as the propagation delay; the speed of propagation is often referenced to the speed of light, as a "velocity factor" less than 1 (1 = c).
The best you can do is to have propagation at the speed of light. Whether you're pumping water into a channel or current between two wires, you have to make currents flow and charge stray capacitances. The fastest that these changes can move through any medium is c (possibilities related to suppression of background quantum states notwithstanding), and they usually move slower than that. The typical velocity factor of a coaxial cable using a solid plastic insulator is about 0.6.
If you turn on a light, you get current flow more or less instantaneously; there is no speed of light delay to the generator and back. This is because there is energy stored in the stray capacitance between the conductors, which supplies energy immediately upon the closure of the circuit.
Hope this wasn't too muddled.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
In 2007 you can ;)
Would that be a low grav server? :]
I can see the scenario, the first sattellite is connected to the internet, there's a post here, it gets slahdotted and falls out of the sky, destroying Dayton, Ohio.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
as described in the article. Oh well, I guess we can forget about interplanetary Quake games for the time being...
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Actually I believe it would be multiple intranets.
Since internet would refer to the entire connected
network. But still SCHWEET.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
Also check Internet Society IPN Special Interest Group ....
Hey, why stop at Mars eh?
We don't know of a way today to convey information between Earth and Mars at a speed faster than the speed of light. [It takes light six to eight minutes to travel the round-trip distance.] We don't foresee a way to get rid of the latency in the communications.
... and the question to that bafflingly obvious comment was
Could there come a day when astronauts or colonies of people living on Mars could communicate with Earth in real-time?
An interplanetary internet...
I can finally finger Uranus!
Don't mod me down, I've waited years to make that joke.
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
If you had read the article, you would have seen that they are not aiming to make an extension to the existing internet. They want to build an entire new internet on mars (and also around Jupiter with its moon Europa), and then build "trunk-lines" to communicate between these internets.
Er...wrong. If you have a routable IP address, you're connected to the Internet, period. Latency is irrelevant (You Will Be Assimilated).
Otherwise, I'd be interested to know where you'd draw the line, particularly speaking as someone who started out on a 2400 line 8-)
Rgasuya aata! : I have been coding Perl and cannot tell where my fingers are now!
Finally scientists have discovered conclusive proof of simple life on Mars with the recent photos of a collection of used AOL CDs buried deep under the Martian soil
Scientists at NASA are now providing these with broadband capacity to see if they'll troll Slashdot, or if they're actually intelligent.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
I think the idea is that the probes talk to each other using TCP/IP. What better way for projects developed by seperate governments desiring a high level of secrecy to cooperate?
:) pathfinder.nasa.mars or scoperta.esa.mars ... ?
I hope they come up with some good hostnames
I've been posting on the net since 1994 and I still haven't come up with a good sig!
Russian, China, Japan or India, name one other country that has a shot in hell of making it to Mars.
Ergo, the only language we should worry about when trying to decide names for planets we could land on is English, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, or Hindi.
--
Peace,
Lord Omlette
ICQ# 77863057
[o]_O
Who is English? Not me! I just live in England. I admit, that choice may make me stupider than actually being English... but none the less, I am not English.
That could get REALLY messy...
That 8 minute delay only means that the link would not be useful
for real-time or on-line applications.
Still, e-mail could be used together with a messaging system (perhaps XML) to perform tasks such as
system monitoring and alert dispatching.
i have done this myself with machines that can't
talk to each other except through e- mail due to firewall restrictions and it works just fine.
In fact, using something like SMS anyone could
have an alert delivered to his/her cellphone if something goes wrong up there.
That still doesn't make it faster than light, though. You put an electron into atom "A", which bumps over to atom "B", kicking its electron off to atom "C", et cetera. But the propagation only occurs at the 'speed of light'. Hence...
--
ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Can you set this on a per-session basis? That is, now, without modifications to TCP/IP?
I think you'd need an awfully big buffer in your TCP stack, but sure, you might be able to get away with it.
If you need mods, you might as well just go ahead and use UDP for everything. It's not going to hurt you. You might even consider using some sort of scary batched UUCP. At least it's intended for links which go up and down, and so on. Maybe you could put bsd on a satellite, and have it grab a video feed, save it to a series of AVI files, which it could then zip (or uharc or something), do a multipart MIME posting to USENET, and then UUCP the files back to Mission Control.
Never assume a technology is dead until you hear the death rattle :)
--
ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Houston to Shuttle: Uhhh, we are showing unusually high network traffic, is there a problem?
Shuttle Astronaut 1: Ahh! I got owned!
Shuttle Astronaut 2: Ahahaha Frank, like my rocket launcher?
Shuttle Astronaut 1: Ohhh, you just wait, I'll get you, you little shit.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZT!
Shuttle Astronaut 2: Ouch! Thats cheap, you llama, lightning guns are for newbies!
Houston writes off the mission. The astronauts make a record for the first space based quake3 server and costing NASA millions of dollars on caffinated beverages and freeze dried pizza.
good point
bash-2.04$ ping -i 100000 pathfinder.mars
heh. bash-2.04 eh? change your damned string, to your hostname or something actually interesting.
Howdy
/. pessimists will but it's about time 'we' got going on connecting to the rest of "de galaxy":
Excellent. Say what you
Vernor Vinge
cheers
front
Here's my understanding of how this works: yes, we have been able to use such a technique to transfer information about a wave of light faster than the speed of light (look here). However, this experiment required a specially prepared chamber; I'm not sure if such a thing could be done through the void of space. At lease not yet. All your Mars are belong to us.
Does this mean that IPv6 will need to be upgraded anytime soon?
Who wants Pork Chops?
mars will probably get DSL before I do, too: they're getting a faster download rate and no one even lives there.
http://www.nakedandfree.com
Why not re-use the existing technology and set up an Iridium or GlobalStar cluster around Mars ? In a next step a GSM network can be installed. While Mars has the disadvantage of not having preexisting tower structures, there are no inhabitants whining about the danger of ' radiation' yet. I bet future Mars dwellers will be more than happy to pay for cellular and long-distance charges.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
yer, i love it when it takes 8 minutes for my streaming video to pause, and another 8 minutes for it to start again :-)
stuff
Are there alternatives from either geophysics or physics to start the dynamo or create an artificial magnetosphere ?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
I am unfamiliar with this mullah label, what do you mean by it?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
"A few atoms won't even light a match" - Dr Jones, 1933
Well now that they have webserver on a chip (http://kyllikki.fluff.org/hardware/wwwpic2/), how about allowing student groups to send up a few of these on the next mission to mars? How about slashdot.mars (ok, more than a few chips).
but the light phenomenon you just explained is a bit too sci-fi to me...anyway i dropped my physics course to program computers, so i guarantee you i don't know what i am talking about.
an engineer told me the antenna worked internally faster than light, but in the end the transmission from one point to another added up to something close but slower than light.
still einstein hasn't been proved wrong. if there's ever concrete proof of speeds higher than light a lot of what einstein did will have to be reviewed, possibly for being dead wrong in his basic assumptions!!! he based everything in a constant speed of light - the c of mc2.
i guess you know all this...just wanted to point out i'd seen such an antenna...
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
Super. So now, for example, will I have to do access www.ci.holland.mi.us.earth.sol? That should be easy enough to remember.
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
about how these projects might not translate into Earth based solutions. I think it is much better for NASA to sell the planets and the raw scientific discovery rather than promises that "if we do this on Mars, then it will solve all of Earth's problems." Too often I hear people say that they support the space program because of the possible benefit it can have on Earth. While a truck load of products and research has can out of the space program, I feel that we benefit much more from the knowledge and understanding that comes from learning about our universe rather than nifty new heat resistant tiles.
Isn't this how electricity works? When you put current into a wire, you are adding electrons on one end and removing them on the other, but it is not the same electrons.
No. You cannot "put current into a wire". You can apply a voltage between two ends. If you do this, an electric field proportional to the voltage will propagate along the wire (with the speed of light - not instantaneous!). Then the electrons will be accelerated by this electric field, i.e. a current flows. The acceleration is countered by the effect that electrons are reflected by defects in the wire (i.e. they are slowed down) - this called "resistance".
Wait a second? Doesn't distance play a factor here? I thought that regardless of the fact that your data travels at the speed of light, the distance to reach the nearest planet is so great that there is a 3-5 min. gap between the send and receive functions?
Electricity is 'faster than light' in that, when you turn on a generator, electrons can flow throughout the circuit instantaneously, without 'filling up' the wires with charge.
This is the same as the Newton's Cradle executive toy where you drop one ball on one side and it's momentum bumps up a ball on the other side.
So the point stands, there is a significant delay in sending a signal between Earth and Mars. But, if the existing medium between the two can be manipulated, and the effect of that manipulation be observed and decoded, the communication delay might be overcome.
Are variances in magnetic or gravitational fields instantaneous?
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
If you want more technical data on the InterPlanetary Internet then check out the IPN section on SpaceRef. I might also point out that TLD will most likely be linked into .sol. ICANN which is now headed by Vint Cerf will not be creating the .mars TLD anytime soon. I have that on a very reliable source. You can look for the first test in space of the IPN this summer. As well the IPN will be used on the 2003 Mars twin rover mission.
Actually, I believe lag will be about 10-12 minutes, or their about. So you'll have no problem faxing your Mars office, but wouldn't want to talk to them. I know it takes an hour for a signal to get to Jupiter, I just don't remember how far Mars is from Jupiter.
If anyone wants a good interesting but short book on Mars, good "The snows of Olympus" Buy Arthur C. Clarke. IT has some really cool pictures done with a program for the amiga called Vistapro.
Why don't they create something that is nearer and where ping times are still acceptable at our beloved moon first? At least, moon is still reachable and when the remote control stuff doesn't work, theoretically, they could still send a couple of people to fix things.
¦ ©® ±
Just starting to get the hang of quantum wierdness too. Does anyone know if it is feasible to use an entangled state for instantaneous communication?
I know that quantum teleportation can only work at the speed at which you can transfer normal information. In this case, you interact a particle with one of the entangled ones and then pass a couple of bits of information through a normal communications channel. These bits, along with the other entangled particle can be used to generate a particle whose state is the same as the original. However, here it is clear that in addition to the 2 bits of ordinary information (communicated conventionally) some kind of information is passing directly between the entangled particles, presumably instantaneously. Can this be used to communicate?
I guess using the simultaneous state-vector collapse of the 2 pairs of particles when one is observered couldn't really be used as a communications channel as the observervation would destroy the entanglement(?)
Of course, ICANN are probably going to try and claim that a 4 billion year old fossilized microbe doesn't count as a "sovereign representative".
Nitpickers!
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Quake3 would be hell.
M$ stock dropped in 1/2 since last year. If you are a MCSE, you will be broke.
So what if the Matians got Internet,too??? If they even do have .Coms and IP addresses
we'll have big problems connecting the 2 worlds because everything will allready be owned by the other side.
Will they have to change to .co.mars or .com2 ???
The air pressure on Martian surface is less than 1% of the normal Eath sea-level values. Normal human body has a temperature of 310 Kelvin, so a human in an "oxygenated Martian atmosphere" would boil to death before running out of oxygen.
You know...
I started on usenet in 1989, but this is the first time I've baited a tRoLL.
I wanted to see what it was like, besides, he was one of the WORST one's I've ever seen!
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
You doubt very correctly.
For applications that require frequent exchanges of data back and forth, achieving high throughput may not be feasible with that latency, but for applications that only care about pushing a high amount of data one way, and getting occasional confirmations of what arrived ok and what needs to be retransmitted, it should work fine.
With a latency measured in minutes, this sounds suspiciously like my master plan to make a cluster of 7 million Atari 2600's, with their 1Mhz cpu and 256 BYTES of ram!!!
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Why bother communicating with Mars??? I thought Venus was the one with all the chicks... :-)
I'm just curious, is NASA using using compression to receive that information faster.. I think some kind of built-in RAR compression for example they could Rar it, Zip it, Rar it, Zip it, Rar it, Zip it, they could develop that mechanism in their satellites or robots to bring down a 500kbyte image to say 15kbyte. Just curious if someone knows.
check out this article on how an interplanetary internet would work: http://www.howstuffworks.com/interplanetary-intern et.htm
By the time that exists, if ever, the English language (if it exists then) will have changed enough that no free subdomain Webhosting company will even consider capitalising on the up.uranus SLD.
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Thats going to be a whole lot of ethernet cable...
So lag will now be minutes instead of seconds. As if it wasn't bad enough already.
We need to develop sub-space comunication so we can quake with people on Mars in real time.
-The American people have overpaid; I am here to ask for a refund.
Why don't they just send zip the whole Internet and send it to the local Mars mirror overnight?
Yes, in the light of more than a few seconds turnaround (basically anything in space further away than the Moon), nothing but email would survive as a communication form. It is however, very suited for much larger delays too, I have some unanswered email in my inbox dating back a few years... (I mean to reply soon...).
OTOH, nothing prevents us to come up with something email like, but utilizing video technology.. Sending a new message is trivial, just press record, and at the end, stop it, the interesting bit comes when replying. I hope MS dies when we need this tech, or you'll see "Original message follows" at the end of your partner's video, and you can see your own again :)
Seriously, imagine a better way, you see your girlfriends face as she hears your message, she pauses, and tells the stories, and then unpauses to go on..
Of course, the personal communications are not the single form you need from Mars (and obviously, in the first years, we won't have any), but most of it can be reduced to a form of offline, spooled data transfer. UUCP anyone? It (or some flashback of it) is very easily suited for bulk, offline data transfer. You could just program the local machinery to transfer data to be sent to a central spool machine, which then sends it away to Earth (or Pluto, for that matter). It's not internet, really, but IP need not be thrown away; and locally (ie. on Mars), TCP/IP is just as efficient, and well-working as here for us.
For the real bulk transfer, something else would be needed than TCP, imagine that any missed packet can get reported only many minutes later, and you don't want to restart the connection then.. Add a bit forward error correction, and large buffering to cope with minutes (millions) of un-acked packets, and here we go.
Shall I work on this, or let your billions of tax dollars work on this for a few years to get this built? :)
"Ten years from now, they could do it in a few seconds." -- The Racketeer of the Hellfire Club, 1993, Phrack 42
Okay, maybe this is totally out to lunch. But I've heard stuff like this before. Any idea if this is legit or not?
If you split a beam of polarized light, and then do something to one (i.e. rotate the polarization), supposedly you can detect it on the other one, and it's instantaneous (i.e. faster than light). So what if you split a powerful laser somewhere equidistant from Mars and the Earth (try finding a place like that!), and had stations on both ends...could you communicate faster than light in that fashion?
Or have I been mislead?
Even sadder is 2001:Odyssey.
Both are technically and economically possible,
but we lack the societal will.
Nasa saved the Galileo Probe after its main
attenna failed using compression. The emergency
back up attenna has like one percent of the capacity of the main attenna or about the speed of Morse code.
Every couple months Galileo passes by one of
main moons and stores a dozen or two pictures
on the tape recorder. Then it transmits them
in compressed form over a day per image.
The Galileo computers were reprogrammed from
Earth to implement compression after attenna
failure.
Galileo acheived 70% of its objectives in the
main mission, and was extended several years.
The bottleneck to extension is not the resources
on Galileo but time on the Deep Space Network.
This is less of a problem due to the Mars probe
failures.
When re-reading Ray Bradbury's seminal work
recently, I niced most of the dates were
between 1999 - 2006.
Why not? The ad campaign for Windows 95 claimed that it would "make a grown man cry." Microsoft already is the PAIN in Uranus.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
So if we will have a 1mbps line to Mars will we still need PAWS to be so flexible? Will I finally be able to send mp3's to the University of Mars? Personally I was hoping for sftp or scp - but all I've ever heard about is ftp to the UM.
[if you don't get it read linux/net/ipv4/tcp_timer.c]
He just mentioned that they were going to translate it to an IP stack :)
:)
Personally I vote for ICP/IP
(Interplanetary Control Protocol over IP)
or maybe TCP/IP/ICP
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
True.
I remember for the last few years feeling a sense of dread as 2001 aproached. Not "end of the millenium" blues, just "unrealized potential".
It makes me sad that as a society we seem to have no desire to push pioneer anything anymore. Granted the frontiers have gotten tougher to reach (sail across the void vs. sail across the ocean), and the challenges are more technologically demanding (single stage to orbit vs. what longitude/lattitude am I at), and that only a small percentage of people actually took the challenge to explore...
Ah heck. This is getting me too depressed, I'm just going to keep thinking about the Pan-Am logo on the side of the 2001 orbiter and smile.
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
When you're stuck on a space station on mars for a year, porn is good no matter how long it takes to download. ;)
load "linux",8,1
Weel, that is pretty much the definition of 'internet'.
Best Slashdot Co
Interesting how they plan to translate all this to a standard IP stack, described in the article a bit vaguely as thus:
"We're working on developing a layered architecture that would allow us to move data from point to point without worrying about the fine details. That way, as new technologies come along, we'll be able to make changes to the underlying physical infrastructures without disturbing the protocols that are already in place. So we'll have a layering of how we flow information across some infrastructure that lets us evolve it in time and accommodate technology infusion without having to scrap our investment."
This technology could be of great use to those in rural and/or remote areas here on Earth, especially where habitat and conditions are most demanding (Lord knows, broadband is currently beyond their reach in most cases..).
Additionally, if they can really pull this off, it could be the next NASA "killer app" like Velcro/Teflon/Tang/etc., improving their profile in the public eye dramatically by developing new "space-age" technology with everyday usefulness. Nice!
_
props to all dead homiez
And what're his pings going to look like from almost 49 million miles away?
Probably a lot like any AOL user.
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
Or IRC. 8 minutes lag is nothing compared to what you can get on IRC.
Rich
I suspect NASA will end up inventing a new protocol for this. IP really wasn't designed for the kind of latencies and packet lossyness that you get on deep space links.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Mars is going to get broadband before I do.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Umm... doesn't multiple interconnected internet's just equal 1 internet?
I knew it wouldn't be long before a cable modem comment was mentioned.
kinda makes you wonder that with such a long mission, would NASA allow its astronauts to bring along porn? (seriously)
It's easy for me to understand that particles themselves (in this case electromagnetic energy) cannot travel faster than the speed of light. Thus, the large amount of "lag" between Earth and Mars.
However, would it be possible to do something similar to the following poor example? If not, please explain.
1) String a rope between two points, one near Mars, one near Earth (yes, I realize the problems this would cause due to orbits and whatnot).
2) Rather than sending electromagnetic energy between the two points, simply "tug" on the rope. Rope only has to move a few millimeters rather than billions of miles.
Please note that I have never taken a physics class... and it shows.
Are there any other crazy concepts for transmitting data faster than the speed of light? Perhaps something along the lines of the "Rope Trick" I suggested a few threads back?
...that more bandwidth-ignorant people aren't already wondering why Mars doesn't at least have a 2.0 Gbit/sec link since they themselves are able to get 4.5 Gbit/sec from their local cable company in Omaha, Nebraska.
Hang on, did I hear that right?
:-\
We can't think of a practical purpose for the ability to communicate arbitrary information between two different PLANETS with an 8-minute delay?
There are still lots of practical uses of first-class mail, which takes about a day to deliver non-arbitrary information 50 miles!
It's certainly a situation which terrestrial communications haven't had to face up to very much; even current satellite relays only give a delay of a few seconds. The increased latency means you have to use better FEC techniques rather than relying on an ARQ retransmission system, but the basic principles are still due to Shannon (RIP).
Most of the trouble faced by communications software and hardware stems from operating in a regime of limited bandwidth or continuously changing router loading, rather than high delays. But as the article points out, scientists have adressed these problems on previous space missions, and the techniques are firming up to make the whole thing more interoperable.
Now we just need to work out how to colonise the planet, before we completely destroy our own one
These sigs are more interesting tha
D00D U CAN JUST USE UUCP
UUCP ROKS MY DAD HAS A DIAL UP 4 EMALE
.
i wonder what will happen as the human race expands into the outer reaches of the solar system. do you think any company will really want to be known as "the dot in .uranus?"
It wasn't that long ago that people were using UUCP and bang paths to push mail around. The jargon file entry for Internet address mentions that the term is used loosely for anything reachable from the Internet, including bang paths.
But the idea of trolling from Mars should sound intriguing enough to the average American that people might actually get interested in it again.
red sand beach party 2010
www.munich.de> traceroute www.stuttgart.de
traceroute to www.stuttgart.de, 60 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 www.munich.de (111.111.111.111) 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms
2 munich.dtag.de (212.183.251.1) 2 ms 1 ms 1 ms
3 boned.dtag.de (212.183.1.1) 12 ms 11 ms 11 ms
4 HH-gw10.usa.net.dtag.de (212.183.3.1) 22 ms 21 ms 21 ms
5 nyc-gw13.usa.net.dtag.de (212.183.3.1) 342 ms 341 ms 341 ms
6 devil01.apdfw.com (204.181.126.82) 400 ms 321 ms 511 ms
7 madmax.ft-monroe.cmpu.net (204.181.110.10) 291 ms 160 ms 320 ms
8 cisco.2501-2.deepspace.net (204.181.110.1) 4261 ms 4280 ms 4291 ms
9 ftmadmax.net.mars (204.181.110.10) 4210 ms 4200 ms 4241 ms
10 23-189.orbital.nasa.gov (128.183.50.1) 8222 ms 8221 ms 8221 ms
11 rtr-cne-e.gsfc.nasa.gov (128.183.50.1) 8222 ms 8221 ms 8221 ms
12 rtr-wan1-cf.gsfc.nasa.gov (128.183.251.1) 8222 ms 8221 ms 8221 ms
13 rtr-internet-ef.gsfc.nasa.gov (192.43.240.36) 8226 ms 8224 ms 8224 ms
14 sl-mae-e-f0-0.sprintlink.net (192.41.177.241) 8227 ms 8325 ms 8318 ms
15 sl-bb5-dc-6-1-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.8.25) 8341 ms 8347 ms *
16 sl-bb3-dc-4-0-0-155M.sprintlink.net (144.232.0.6) 8329 ms * 8348 ms
17 144.232.8.113 (144.232.8.113) 8351 ms 8343 ms 8340 ms
18 sl-bb1-atl-4-0-0-155M.sprintlink.net (144.232.1.198) 8340 ms * 8361 ms
19 sl-bb5-fw-1-0-0.sprintlink.net (144.232.8.98) 8386 ms 8384 ms 8379 ms
20 sl-bb1-fw-4-0-0-155M.sprintlink.net (144.232.1.150) 8386 ms 8385 ms *
21 sl-gw13-fw-0-0.sprintlink.net (144.228.30.17) 8387 ms * *
22 sl-comp-3-0.sprintlink.net (144.228.137.14) 8391 ms 8390 ms *
23 sl-stuttgart-1-0.sprintlink.net (144.228.138.14) 8391 ms 8390 ms *
24 www.stuttgart.de (222.222.222.222) 8391 ms 9040 ms *
Trace complete
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Well, I guess that answers THAT question.
The REAL jabber has the /. user id: 13196
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
Mars is 4 light minutes away from the earth. Even if we had things working at light speed, there would be an eight minute delay between a request and a response... It sounds nice, but I can't really think of a practical purpose for it, except for perhaps e-mail...
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
Seriously though, the data rate of 1Mbps is pretty pathetic. I have a cable modem that is faster than that. I am writing communications firmware for a satellite that will be relaying data back to Earth at over 20 times that speed via X-band. If we want broadband, let's really get it rather than settling for something that will be saturated shortly after deployment.
Quick, someone trademark Mars Online, MOL, and Marslink.net.
The International Astronomical Union name for the planet is "Mars".
.ma already is used for Morocco
The web site you point to mentions that English is the international language for professional astronomy.
And
d00d! w3 0wn j00! @ll y0r r0v3r R b3l0ng 2 us!1! PH34R 0UR M4D SK1LLZ!!!!
Basically, latency and bandwidth have nothing to do with each other. The reason we perceive latency to affect bandwidth on the internet is because the internet requires acknoledgements for every n packets. That means that if you have a high latency, it'll take awhile for the ACK to come back and thus you slow down the transmission. If you design a protocol that takes into account that an ACK takes 8 minutes to arrive, you can get full bandwidth at high latency. You could even use TCP, if you expand the sliding window to allow it to send, say, 16 minutes worth of packets without requiring an ACK. It would suck for telnet, but streaming data (which is what NASA wants to do) would be fine.
Go Badgers! -- #include "std/disclaimer.h"
Just imagine being on Mars and being unable to read /. for a whole week because Earth and Mars are on opposite sides of the sun. Will you be tough enough to survive it?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
*shudder* I apologize for the word "Ameriocentric."
.ge, it's .de for Deutchland.
.ma domain? or would that suggest that residents of Massachusetts, USA, are not of this Earth?
s .h tml for further reading.
When domain names were drawn up for nations, we used ISO 3166, which was agreed upon by people who don't only speak English. Germany isn't
Granted, we don't know the Latin spelling of what Martians call their home planet (nevermind their native tounge), but I find it hard to believe that "Mars" is the only name for that particular moving star in the sky.
Italian, Spanish, Romanian: "Marte"
Czech: "Smrtonos"
Arabic (the language that many stars are named in) "Merrikh"
Hebrew: "Ma'adim"
Mandarin: "Huoxing"
Japaneese: "Kasei"
Most languages seem to agree on using an "M" sound to start the word. Perhaps we should use the
http://www.seds.org/nineplanets/nineplanets/day
bash-2.04$ ping -i 100000 pathfinder.mars
PING pathfinder.mars (208.56.123.4): 56 data bytes
request timed out
request timed out
request timed out
64 bytes from 208.56.123.4: icmp_seq=3 ttl=245 time=86603.712 ms
request timed out
request timed out
Would be kinda cool to set up a quake2 server at mars, even thou the ping would suck.....
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
I'm sorry, but having 4 or 5 probes on an extremely high-latency link, probably not directly connected to the Internet, does not qualify to be part of the Internet. It will be decades before anything beyond low earth orbit will attain enough connectivity to really become connected to the Internet.
Don't get me wrong, I'm fascinated by NASA's Deep Space Network and everything, but we're not there yet. Hell, even the combined bandwidth of all low earth orbit satellites is miniscule compared to ground links.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
* we do not increase the rtt estimate. rto is initialized
* from rtt, but increases here. Jacobson (SIGCOMM 88) suggests
* that doubling rto each time is the least we can get away with.
* In KA9Q, Karn uses this for the first few times, and then
* goes to quadratic. netBSD doubles, but only goes up to *64,
* and clamps at 1 to 64 sec afterwards. Note that 120 sec is
* defined in the protocol as the maximum possible RTT. I guess
* we'll have to use something other than TCP to talk to the
* University of Mars.
So maybe we're a while off, eh?
-----
Somehow I don't see this as all so wonderful...
Mars is going to get broadband before I do out here in the stix, damn!
It's NOT fair I tell you...
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
Chad Edwards, when asked about the possibility of online gaming to Mars, said that they were concerned about high ping times. Edwards did say that they are confident, however, that their ping times will be lower than those currently enjoyed by players on Blizzard's battle.net service.