DTN: Vint Cerf And NASA Just Created An Internet For Whole Solar System
Short Bytes: Making the communication systems more reliable for its future missions, NASA and Google VP Vint Cerf has created a Solar System Internet service. Called DTN, or Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking, this service is already incorporated in the software suite at the International Space Station.
This system has been designed by a team of NASA scientists who were led by Google VP Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the internet”.
This solar system internet service is designed to work in the outer space to improve the data availability for different experiments being carried out at space stations.
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DTN provides a reliable network that works on the principle of “store and forward”. The network stores a partial data packet along a communication path before it could be sent ahead. Then, those packets are re-bundled at the final destination that could be anything — either some station on Earth, spaceships in deep space, or some other planet.
On the Internation Space Station, DTN has already been incorporated in the software suite that is used by the scientists to send and receive data.
Vint Cerf has worked as a visiting scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to create DTN. About this historic launch, here’s what he had to say:
Our experience with DTN on the space station leads to additional terrestrial applications especially for mobile communications in which connections may be erratic and discontinuous.
The work on this solar system internet is a part of NASA’s decade-long work on Advanced Exploration Systems. This adds another brick in the road to the NASA’s safe mission operations in deep space.
You can read more about DTN here on NASA’s website.
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