Slashdot Mirror
Web Enabled Spacecraft
gilgsn writes "Yahoo has an article from space.com about a satellite which will be operated by FTP over TCP/IP on the Internet! The CHIP (Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer) spacecraft will examine the stuff between stars, the so-called void of space that is actually rich with hot gas. The choice of protocol was dictated by economics. I wonder what OS it will run and if communications will be encrypted?"
There'is actually a proposal for a "space internet" where long ping times, high data loss etc. occur.
It is called "Interplanetary Internet SIG":
http://www.ipnsig.org/home.htm
So... they do not use the common TCP/IP things, but their networking principle is closely related to IP.
This project has been going on for quite sometime and has already been repeatedly demonstrated for low earth orbit satellites. For details please see:http://ipinspace.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Pedantic, I know, but FTP != web. HTTP == web. I know a lot of people don't grasp the difference between the internet and the world-wide-web, but you'd have thought someone writing web content might have got it right.
Also, ethernet != internet (the program manager for the project got that one wrong).
"The Milliard Gargantubrain? A mere abacus - mention it not."
i would say it will run netbsd. NASA employee's are well know netbsd developers (Jason Thorpe, now working for wasabi though), and NASA's name appears on the licences on many files withing the netbsd tree
There is a page at berkeley.edu that talks in more depth about the satellite (http://chips.ssl.berkeley.edu/index.html) but doesn't really cover command/control and software issues. Maybe an Ask Slashdot for the maintainer of the page is in order?
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
FTP is used as a control protocol in plenty of environments. It's really quite simple. You upload one or more files with instructions in it. Then you upload a semaphore file to say your message is complete. The receiving end reads the directory every 10 seconds or so and starts processing when it sees the last file. I imagine that the satellite would return data instead of instructions, and then the process would repeat. The FTP protocol per se has nothing to do with controlling the satellite; it's all about using files as messages.
I've seen credit card authorizations go through this way. UNIX and mainframe machines often exchange data this way when turn-around time is not important. I would assume NASA doesn't need to control the satellite second-by-second.
OTOH, doesn't TCP use alot of SYN, ACK etc. to establish/close a connection? This could be a problem because it multiplies the round trip time which could have been avoided by using a special purpose protocol.
I'm also wondering if there would be a high error rate because of atmospheric disturbances and such. If so, TCP would be really useful because you get error correction for free.
The technical paper is on the SpaceDev website.
They are using VxWorks, PSOS, OS-9, and Linux. Looks like VxWorks is what will be running on the satellite, with less than 20 lines of code in the actual communication routines...
LR
amateur radio operatros can do this daily.
I have "pinged" the dove sattelite at least 20 times in my life, Pinged and sent email to MIR, had a kind-of IRC chat with 2 different Space shuttle missions and have listened to my ping come back from the moon.
ham radio, you get to do things that other only wish they could do.
all of this was done at 144-148mhz with standard radio equipment and radio modem called a TNC. MIR was the easiest to contact.... moonbounce requires a friend with no wife and lots of money.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Here are some website links:
Spacedev is (duh)
www.spacedev.com
CHIPSat can be found under Missions.
Spacedev's stock price can be found at:
finance.yahoo.com
The Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley
chips.ssl.berkeley.edu
Hmm, did I hear my name called? :-)
~~
By the way, this story is a dupe, and I don't think anyone else has called on it yet. It was posted several months ago under a topic of something like '.mars is coming.' and talked about how satellites around Mars would use TCP/IP.. just like, er, this article.
mogorific carpentry experiments
No, it's not. However it IS the first satellite to ONLY use TCP/IP to communicate.
From the spacedev website:
"The Cosmic Hot Interstellar Plasma Spectrometer Satellite (CHIPSat) will be the first mission to use end-to-end satellite operations with TCP/IP and FTP. This concept has been analyzed and demonstrated by the NASA OMNI team via UoSAT-12; however, CHIPSat will be the first to implement the concept as the primary means of satellite communication."
Radio amateurs have had fileservers in space for over ten years. The datarate and capacity are too low for serious mp3 usage, but I am sure that an mp3 file has appeared on one of them...