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Quad Lasers Deliver Fast, Earth-Based Internet To the Moon
A joint project involving NASA and MIT researchers had demonstrated technology last year that could supply a lunar colony with broadband via lasers ("faster Internet access than many U.S. homes get") and has already demonstrated its worth in communications with spacecraft. From ComputerWorld's article: "The Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) kicked off last September with the launch of NASA's LADEE (Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer), a research satellite [formerly] orbiting the moon. NASA built a laser communications module into LADEE for use in the high-speed wireless experiment. LLCD has already proved itself, transmitting data from LADEE to Earth at 622Mbps (bits per second) and in the other direction at 19.44Mbps, according to MIT. It beat the fastest-ever radio communication to the moon by a factor of 4,800." Communicating at such distances means overcoming various challenges; one of the biggest is the variability in Earth's atmosphere. The LLCD didn't try to power through the atmosphere at only one spot, therefore, but used four separate beams in the New Mexico desert, each aimed "through a different column of air, where the light-bending effects of the atmosphere are slightly different. That increased the chance that at least one of the beams would reach the receiver on the LADEE. Test results [were] promising, according to MIT, with the 384,633-kilometer optical link providing error-free performance in both darkness and bright sunlight, through partly transparent thin clouds, and through atmospheric turbulence that affected signal power." At the CLEO: 2014 conference in June, researchers will provide a comprehensive explanation of how it worked.
gaming's going to suck
The moon rulez!
Suck it earth scum! You can't deny it.
"faster Internet access than many U.S. homes get"
That's not hard to do. In the United States, our high speed Internet is much like our high speed rail...
The moon, eh? This will be important when we get around to mining the moon into a block of Swiss cheese for whatever mineral riches it possesses. I predict China will be the first, and we Americans will follow soon after they have opened the door.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Beam me up.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Who would have thought!? Genius!
High bandwidth is great for large transfers, but the latency might make casual browsing difficult.
So show of hands here, who has a 622 Mbps at home? That's right, as of this article, your "last mile" officially sucks more than LADEE's last 250,000 miles
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
their last one
and then $10 per each 50GB over that.
Control-F latency no results found.
384400 kilometers (earth to moon distance according to google) at speed of light is about 1.3 seconds, round trip that's 2.6 seconds.
That is pretty terrible but absolutely unavoidable.
But any article about broadband on the moon that does not discuss latency is shit journalism at best.
Exactly, more bandwidth could be less important than latency:
http://pandawhale.com/post/396...
New things are always on the horizon
Readers here should know that LADEE was crashed into the moon more than a month ago. Yes, NASA did research on laser communication using LADEE, but reporting it in present tense is misleading. (...and the last Slashdot article on LADEE incorrectly reported where it crashed.) Previous Slashdot articles already reported the laser communication research.
The fastest internet connection for your lunar internet needs.
Fastest Speeds ever.*
No data cap.**
Stream all your favorite videos.***
*Speeds of 0kbps or higher meet the terms of service for this plan.
**Up to 400 MB a month, then overage charges of $10,000.00 for each additional MB.
***Assuming that the CDN's pay to access our high speed lunar link.
Comcast, bringing the best of the internet to the moon. Because, f**k you, that's why.
NASA can't even afford a decent space telescope, so why would anybody think they can afford to build a lunar colony that would require such as laser system ?
No one can defeat the quad laser.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNYMxgNKIEU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
First Spam from Space
That's typical - a decent download speed at 622 MBps, but the upload sucks again, so Moondwellers wouldn't be able to run their own servers!
Earth-based? As opposed to what, Internet from Mars?
Why do you want to connect the moon with the Internet? There is nobody on the moon. You should rather try to establish a 24h broadband connection to the ISS, which currently doesn't exist (its only a couple of hours per day when you can make video connections to ISS).
Obviously, they meant Quad "Lasers".
You've got nothing on Australia... Bicycle To The Home anyone? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TptIs0k-spg
It seems at this point the marketeer assault on the English language has proceeded to the point where even NASA does not understand what speed is.
The link described is a very slow pipe by any measure, and that is imposed by the distance involved and the speed of light itself. It is the dimension of *width* they compare, which cannot in any reasonable way be equated with speed. If 'speed' is measured by bandwidth, then it would follow that a semi tractor with two trailers is much faster than a Maserati.
Yeah. Right.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
No one can defeat the quad laser:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNYMxgNKIEU&feature=kp
I think they will be playing civilization beyond earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which is due out soon. I know I will!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
I hear the Russians have one O_o
When you have a 1Gbps connection to a tier 1 provider who's peered with multiple other tier 1 providers on Nx100Gbps Etherbundles at the same location as your handoff, then you have a 1Gbps connection. Otherwise, you have a 1Gbps access-rate to a massively-oversubscribed PE node, but which fortunately at this point, can fill all users' bandwidth needs because no one actually needs as much bandwidth as they think they do.
Check it out 'yall, check it, check it out
The mooninites will GREATLY appreciate this.
Thursday between 8:00am and 5:00pm. Installer will need access to home. Please have any dogs properly confined. Thank You Time Warner Cable
I prefer to use a subspace transceiver. I get about 50 billion gigaquads/sec.
There's going to be hell to pay when the sharks get ahold of these things.
It's like HughesNet on the moon. Gaming and anything else like remote viewers (RDP, conference calling, etc) apps will suck too. It's kinda like how on CNN when you see those Satellite uplink interviews where they pause for like 5 seconds between questions and answers, except for everything. After having DirecWay on the side of my house for less than the 30 day trial period, I have a new respect for people remote controlling the rover on mars.
Speak for yourself.
Newt keep up on events without streaming Fox News?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Incoming power at the satellite is stated as a nanowatt. I'm pretty sure this puts it way below the threshold of most, if not all, solid state optical detectors. I'm thinking some kind of FAST photomultiplier tube, but I really have no idea. Any thoughts?
Think of using something like this to transmit terrestrially through air of many miles/kilometers distance RELIABLY rather than the one or (if you're lucky) two you get today: it would be a godsend and could replace a LOT of metro microwave (depending on which city and its local climate, of course) without having to lay fiber. Its the unlicensed holy grail, really.
We have a lunar colony? Who knew?
I suppose its symptomatic of the generation that we can't think about the logistics of a real lunar colony until we figure out how they would get their internet porn.
I am deeply skeptical of a moon colony. I really don't think it will ever happen.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
There is, apart from some clouds, nothing in between. Those are ideal conditions. Considering that even the radio links of the moon missions had a few megabits of channel capacity, that's not very much. (Yes those links were analog, but Shannon has showed that you can still express the capacity of such a channel in bits or shannons)
But wouldn't it be easier to have a satellite on earth orbit that was locked on the same apparent orbit than moon and then transmit data through that. By communicating with that satellite using radio and then from that satellite to moon using laser you wouldn't have to work the laser through the atmosphere and after you establish a stable station on moon with a line of sight to earth you would have a continuous beam channel going.
There are two problems: One to many, and point to point. This is true in routing and packet forward networking. You will want an end to end connection to do more "realtime" or "parcipitative" or "dynamic" communications (in a relative sense). However, you will also want to have a database of information that is pushed towards the endpoints and cached, ready for their request. This is what RF is good at because it can broadcast data out to multiple points omni-directionally or via a cone, to service multiple targets at once (in case one receiver is down), which can the repeat the process (and clone to nearby receivers who were down). Point to point can serve as a link between larger static caches as well.
Imagine you emailed your lunar friend a link to a video about puppies playing. The email update comes in over the point-to-point. When they click the link, the video instantly starts playing because it is already on the moon because others have already requested that video and it is stored in the cache. They get the puppy video from their neighbor or the neighborhood cache, or the "celestial" cache, on up to the source if need be. That one video is only ever transferred to the moon ONCE. Ah, but what if someone renames the video? Oh noes! Then there is two copies if URLs are used as the identifying signature. Which illustrates why URLs are the dumbest way to identify information ever. What you want is to refer to the information by its fingerprint. A readable name can point to a hash as the resource ID. That way the puppie video can have thousands of names, but the cache will still only contain one copy of that video. Infohashes deduplicate resourses. NASA needs to incorporate some aspects of Bittorrent into their network to make it practical.
I think we need a terrestrial version of NASA's DTN (Disruption Tolerant Network). The Internet already showed us that the idea of resources residing on a "server" at a URL is moronic: That's not how the current Internet even works: caches exist. Data comes from caches if possible. We need to re-evaluate the terrestrial Internet and leverage our one-to-many RF tech to enhance the point to point laser network (hint: firberoptics are tubes for lasers).
TL;DR: Use the communication method that the inherent nature of the universe favors for the given problem space.
Just add Quadraphonic sound and hey man, the Alan Parsons Project will be complete!
Telnetting to the moon
Let me play amoung delays
Let me see what lag is like
On jupiter and mars
on "Fly me to the moon" from F.Sinatra
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Why dont the moon satellite transform everything to a satellite orbiting earth, instead of sending directly to the earth surface (having problem with the atmosphere)? The earth satellite has less problem with atmosphere.
Meh.. satellite communication always have a big lag, next time try using a submarine cable :P
Why bother doing this from the ground? Why not relay through a satellite? Ground stations are fine for testing, but will be completely out of touch a lot of the time even after you've solved the atmospheric problem.