Slashdot Mirror
NASA Tests Deep-Space Network Modeled On the Internet
hcg50a writes "NASA has successfully tested the first deep space communications network modeled on the Internet. Working as part of a NASA-wide team, engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA, used software called Disruption-Tolerant Networking, or DTN, to transmit dozens of space images to and from a NASA science spacecraft located about 20 million miles from Earth. The store-and-forward protocol was designed by NASA in consultation with Vint Cerf. Here's a discussion from last July before the test began."
We already have a working _global_ _worldwide_ _free_ network based on store-and-forward protocols.
It's called FIDONet. It's almost dead now, but it was very alive during early 90-s before the advent of cheap Internet.
Kids...
Are you being sarcastic or just stupid?
I am going to assume the later. Whereas imagine e-mail being a train car, and TCP/IP (i.e. internet) being the railroad tracks. The tracks will use switches and routers to set the fastest path for you. E-mail does store and forward, however it does it point-to-point (origin to destination).
So you load up the train car with apples for grandma, and send it towards grandma. The car will tell the switch operators where you want to go and they will make all of the required path changes. Than if you get there, you are suppose to call your wife and let her know if grandma got the apples. If grandma isn't there, you don't call, the TTL expires, and you die.
With space you have no internet (i.e. road) and TTLs are too high to use the same technology we use here. So if you have no road to drive on you cannot get to grandma.
So with your statement, you would load up your apples into a train car sitting on the side of a field, while grandma dies from hunger. If only ...
With space you have no internet (i.e. road) and TTLs are too high to use the same technology we use here.
You might think so, but it *has* been shown to work. I mean, don't tell me you never heard of the pigeon protocol?
It's called trademark, not copyright and someone already did it: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=jemidk.2.1
why do you assume e-mail means TCP/IP?
i guess you don't remember UUCP? yep, that was a store-and-forward protocol, which evolved into a 'network of networks' working to get e-mail and netnews before the Internet.
-Kz-