NASA's Next Mars Mission Will Join the Interplanetary Internet

New submitter radioedit writes "When the MAVEN orbiter arrives at Mars on 22 September 2014, the spacecraft will join up with the other seven nodes of NASA's interplanetary internet, exchanging data with orbiters, rovers on the surface, and us back on Earth using delay-tolerant protocols. It's the latest part of Vint Cerf's mission (video) to create a giant antenna array across the solar system that'll be able to receive signals by laser from Alpha Centauri."

Comments

NASA's interplanetary internet just formed

[Spy Handler]

and NSA is already snooping

signals by laser from Alpha Centauri

[bob_super]

Latency of 9 years for a round-trip, and there I thought that calling the helpdesk was slow...

Re:signals by laser from Alpha Centauri

[ubrgeek]

And that's without Verizon capping the monthly bandwidth for NASA's Unlimited Internet plan.

Re:signals by laser from Alpha Centauri

[hraponssi]

What did you expect. It's Maven crawling along like an Ant. Just infinitely more complex and bloated.

Network structure

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if they use IPv4 or IPv6.
And did NASA already pre-allocate subnets and create routing tables for the other planets in advance?

Re:Network structure

[unixisc]

I was wondering that as well. Actually, I daresay we might need IPv7, w/ 512 bits of addressing, since we have no idea how many aliens are out there, & how many interplanetary nodes would be needed. Earth would have a /384 subnet, and within that, IPv6 would be contained.

Re:What laser?

[unixisc]

First, it needs to be built into Civ or FreeCiv

Imagine

[BringsApples]

An internet for your own use, with no worries about ass-hats fucking with it, or trying to break it. Just think of all of the (non-hardware) obstacles that they don't have to worry about. Surely they have their own fair share of difficulties that we don't have to deal with here on Earth, but they're free to deal with those obstacles in an environment that we all would love.

Will Mr. Cerf's Profile Pic

[retroworks]

Consume all the bandwidth? My god, the article is scary with his face taking up the 23" LCD screen. Hope that doesn't take off, he invaded my personal space.