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Google Chief, NASA Launch Interplanetary Internet Connection In Space

MOUNTAIN VIEW (CBS SF) -- Earthling emails to Mars and YouTube videos to Venus will no longer the stuff of sci-fi movies.

A team of NASA scientists, led by Google VP Vint Cerf, has designed a Solar System Internet connection that actually works in outer space. The technology is now being tested aboard the International Space Station.

This is not your garden-variety Internet connection. It makes your high-speed broadband look like your dad's old 1990's dial-up modem.

The connection relies on Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking or DTN, a technology designed to work over long distances and through time delays.

Interplanetary communication presents obvious challenges of time and space, and DTN handles the challenge of transmitting information over millions of miles.

"The methods we use in the terrestrial Internet don't quite work when we're going at interplanetary distances," Cerf explains in a NASA-produced video. "After quite a bit of work, we realized we needed to design a new set of communication protocols."

"If you're doing space communication and you have something sitting on the surface of a planet, that is rotating, you can't talk to it until it comes back around again," explains Cerf. "Some satellites may behave in the same way. You may not be able to see them and talk to them, so communication in this deep space network become disrupted."

DTN deals with the disruptions of time and distance with what's called Bundle Protocol. When a transmission is disrupted by some sort of interference, it "instructs recipient machines to save the bundles until they're completely transmitted, no matter how long that takes." Then, they can be forwarded and re-bundled to the final destination, whether it be "ground stations on Earth, robotic spacecraft in deep space, or, one day, humans living on other planets."

A "store and forward" data network was used successfully last month when International Space Station commander Sunita Williams successfully used DTN to control a small Lego robot in Germany.

Bear in mind the ISS orbits at a distance of about 220 miles above earth and a speed of about 17,150 miles per hour, no where near the distances spanning interplanetary communications. But NASA says this latest experiment marks the beginning of the "space station as a node in the evolving Solar System Internet."

While it may be some time before everyday Earthlings will emailing other planets, scientists hope to use the Solar System Internet to communicate with unmanned vehicles across our galaxy.

"The experimental DTN we've tested from the space station may one day be used by humans on a spacecraft in orbit around Mars to operate robots on the surface," says NASA's Badri Younes, "or from Earth using orbiting satellites as relay stations."

VIDEO: Learn more about Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking or DTN

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