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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
"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
Fuck everything, we are doing five beams!!!
Life is not for the lazy.
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
No one can defeat the quad laser. The bullet is enormous, there is no escaping.
their last one
LOL. That was my first thought too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
and then $10 per each 50GB over that.
Exactly, more bandwidth could be less important than latency:
http://pandawhale.com/post/396...
New things are always on the horizon
So you're saying no pro series astronaut FPS earth deathmatching?
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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.
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 ?
Just needs a good CDN.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm going to build my Moon Internet Communications System with 11 lasers
and I'm going to hire sharks to aim them
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
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 it backwards, the high speed is moon->earth, earth->moon is the slow one.
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.
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.
Now that's just nitpicking.
All I know is that the vast majority of the stuff I attempt to download is coming in at highest speed my HDD could download. As a home user, that's heaven.
All else is useless detail.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.