US Air Force Building Space Router

Saint Aardvark writes "From the ISTS daily news comes a story on the US Air Force seeking to build a space router. From TFA: "Northrop Grumman and Caspian Networks are collaborating to develop an Internet Protocol router that can withstand the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit. The space-hardened IP router will be part of the Air Force's Transformational Satellite Communications System, which will provide IP-based communications to warfighters." I wonder what the ping times would be like..."

Comments

What's so special about routers?

[hazee]

Every satelite up there has to withstand "the constant barrage of solar radiation in orbit". If the communications, or video or whatever got scrambled, then they wouldn't be a whole lot of use.

So what's so special about a router?

Re:What's so special about routers?

[TheFlyingGoat]

If you set up a router in geosynchronous orbit around Mars, you wouldn't need line of sight to get the data from a rover back to Earth. You could do this with just a repeater, though.

It gets interesting as we spread out more and more. You can set up a router in geosynchronous orbit around each planet, and data has a much more likely chance of getting back to Earth. You can relay pictures of the stars from Mars to Earth when it's on the other side of the sun.

You can also send satellites out past Pluto, and if you have a router in orbit around Pluto, there's a good chance for it to relay the signal back to Saturn, Neptune, or Uranus. Then those can relay it back closer and so on. It's much better than the laser aligned communications we use now, where the satellite needs a direct line back to Earth.

universal IP network

[alphakappa]

Maybe this is a sign of things to come. As we send spacecrafts to Mars and other planets (and someday planets beyond our solar system), the InterPlanetary Internet will need such routers. A router satellite followed by routers in space and on other planets would create a nice little backbone to base our communications on. There would be one hell of a delay, but we could send our spacecrafts farther and farther away without losing the ability to communicate.

Re:How to harden a router.

[3rd_Floo]

I know this was a joke, but just to give some extra insight to some rad hardening perticulars... Tinfoil would not be enough, creating efficient Rad hardened electronics is an interesting problem. Not only do you have to deal with simple EM types of interference, but the possibility of radiation flipping the bit stored in a register. Typically parallel processors that do redundant checks on data, multipath techniques and other sharing and swarm-consensus types of architectures would be employed. This is the preferred method because strapping a big honking metal plate is MUCH more costly, just to negate rad effects. Although they would still have to shield it against small-debris impacts.