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The Tech Aboard the International Space Station
CNETNate writes "With its own file server for uploaded Hollywood blockbusters, a 10Mbps Internet connection to Earth, and around a hundred IBM ThinkPad notebooks, the consumer technology aboard the $150 billion International Space Station is impressive. It's the responsibility of just two guys to maintain the uptime of the Space Station's IT, and they have given CNET an in-depth interview to explain what tech's aboard, how it works, and whether Windows viruses are a threat to the astronauts. In a related feature, the Space Station's internal network (which operates over bandwidth of just 1Mbps) and its connected array of Lenovo notebooks is explained, along with the tech we could see in the future."
Nah, wouldn't be so bad.
ISS orbits at between 278 km (173 mi) and 460 km (286 mi) from Earth.
LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites orbit at about 400 km, and Geostationary sats orbit at 35,786 km over the equator.
I'm connected to a GEO sat right now (I'm in the Gulf of Aden atm), and ping time is just under 800ms. Not great, admittedly, but really not bad.
I imagine NASA keeps their pipe pretty full 24/7 and that might generate some lag, but at their altitude, they are probably getting 300ms ping times or better. It also depends on where your data goes once it hits the Earth station. We had a horrible bottleneck at Eik, Norway so we routed the data through Mirimar, Florida and it lopped off about 600ms from our ping time.
I'm guessing NASA has a pretty sweet peering arrangement ;)
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
Our scientific equipment "Declic" was sent to the ISS last august. It runs Linux and uC-OS II on a whole pile of microprocessors. The Linux of the part of the system that we built was completely custom built based on "linux from scratch". For an interesting read: Linux Journal
The 2.6 kernel was state of the art when we built it, but we needed its lower latency features.