What strikes me is not the bandwidth achieved but the precision of the technology to aim the laser. 19 million miles is a great distance to successfully aim a beam of light. As this technology develops, real time communications with objects in orbit like around Mars will be possible.
I’m wondering if we will need to tweak our Internet protocols to include interplanetary time? I would imagine mirroring would be much more important. Because light can only go so fast.
What strikes me is not the bandwidth achieved but the precision of the technology to aim the laser. 19 million miles is a great distance to successfully aim a beam of light. As this technology develops, real time communications with objects in orbit like around Mars will be possible.
Well realtime is just not true. But cool technology nonetheless.
The beam is reeeealy wide by the time it gets there. Still a great achivement, though.
I’m wondering if we will need to tweak our Internet protocols to include interplanetary time? I would imagine mirroring would be much more important. Because light can only go so fast.
Yes, the high latency and intermittent connectivity is a big challenge. Delay tolerant networking (DTN) is one good way of solving this problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
I’m sure several OSI layers have already been modified by NASA to suit their needs. But, the protocols will pretty much remain standard.
I think the issue, again will be date and time.
DDMMYYYY + Planet + Orbit?
software developers are seething
UTC and forget
I presume that we’re not yet concerned with what the Ansible tech awoke in the vast emptiness between, hmm?